In 2004, Japan abolished part of its spousal exemption regulations. This paper examines, on theoretical and empirical levels, the effects of this tax reform on the income of married women, allowing for heterogeneous effects across income distribution. The empirical results from quantile...

Japan’s traditional long-term employment practice, loosely termed “lifetime employment,” once attracted much attention, but its fortunes have not been tracked since the 1990s. The authors use micro data from the Japanese government’s Basic Survey on Wage Structure to estimate permanent...

Japan's traditional long-term employment practice, loosely termed “lifetime employment,†once attracted much attention, but its fortunes have not been tracked since the 1990s. The authors use micro data from the Japanese government's Basic Survey on Wage Structure to estimate permanent...

(19892003). We perform several decomposition analyses of changes in the distribution of the hourly wage. We observe that lower returns to education and years of tenure contribute to a diminishing income disparity between groups for both sexes. A larger variance within a group contributes to the...

Diverging economic inequality has become a common focus of economic debate in developed countries. In particular, the recent experience of Japan has started attracting international attention. We take advantage of a rich micro-level data set from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (1989-2003) to...

Wage increases, along with job tenure, are one of the most robust empirical regularities found in labor economics. Several theories explain these empirical regularities, and such theories offer sharp empirical predictions for the relation between productivity-tenure and wage-tenure profiles. The...

What happened to the traditional, long-term employment practices in Japan after the 1990s has remained unexplored. We take advantage of a micro data set from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure to provide new evidence regarding the years of tenure for Japanese male workers after a decade-long...

By using the empirical likelihood (EL), we consider the construction of pointwise confidence intervals (CIs) for nonparametric nonlinear nonstationary regression models with nonlinear nonstationary heterogeneous errors. It is well known that the EL-based CI has attractive properties such as data...

Game theory presents a useful analytical tool for addressing the problem of international cooperation and the formation of institutions. We first examine four problems that must be solved to achieve international cooperation: the common knowledge problem, agreement problem, compliance problem,...