I examine the extent and causes of digital inequality in the three countries of East Asia – Japan, South Korea and Singapore. I take advantage of individual-level microdata collected in the three countries between 1997 and 2000, and highlight differences in the socio-economic and demographic...

Socially embedded features in Japanese markets and how market activities in Japan deviate from the West have attracted considerable attention from a wide range of scholars in the social sciences. But the period of economic stagnation following the burst of the bubble economy in 1990 has brought...

Features of institutional tracking play a key role in shaping an individualfs access to and advancement through higher education in Japan. This paper brings institutional tracking features to the foreground and examines the process by which individuals advance from middle school to high school,...

This paper examines the origins and dynamic evolution of the lifetime employment system in Japan from the beginning of the 20th century to present. Based on the historical perspective developed in the paper, we derive implications to the future course of the Japanese employment system. In this...

In this paper I address two critical questions about divorce in postwar Japan: Why is the divorce rate so low compared to other industrialized economies? And, Why is it rising? I examine divorce in the context of institutional change, and discuss how the rising divorce rate in Japan is an...

This paper examines the relationship between specialization and happiness in marriage in the U.S. and Japan. Our findings, based on the General Social Surveys in the U.S. and Japan, indicate both similarities and differences in the determinants of marital happiness in the two countries. In the...

This article examines whether there are differences in men’s and women’s use of the Internet and whether any such gender gaps have changed in recent years. The authors use data from several surveys during the period 1997 to 2001 to show trends in Internet usage and to estimate regression...

Based on annual data from Japan for the period 1960 to 2010, we investigate the government expenditure-economic growth relation in Japan by using the autoregressive distributed lag test for threshold cointegration developed by Li and Lee (2010). In particular, we evaluate the validity of...