Japan’s new bar examination has been administered since 2006. This paper attempts to analyze how professors selected as members of the committee (The Justice Ministry's committee of the new national bar examination) influence the results of the examination. I use a panel data set to control...

In the Japanese Professional Baseball League, the starting pitcher is announced prior to the game in the Pacific League but not in the Central League. I attempt to investigate how the release of information concerning a starting pitcher prior to the game affects attendance. My major findings...

Japanese prefecture level panel data for the period 1986–2003 was used to analyze and compare the determinants of teenage body mass index (BMI) by sex. Major findings through random effects estimation were as follows: (1) BMI consistently increased during the period in males aged 10–16 and...

Empirical results using cross-country data suggest that public spending on education increases the rate of students skipping school but does not influence the rate of students completing school. This infers that public spending on education leads to a deterioration in the effectiveness of education.

Japanese prefecture level panel data for the period 1986–2003 was used to analyze and compare the determinants of teenage body mass index (BMI) by sex and geographical area. Major findings through random effects estimation were as follows: (1) BMI consistently increased during the period in...

Using Japan’s prefecture-level panel data from 1989-2001, this paper examines the influence of the social norm on a person’s smoking behavior when the complementary relationship between smoking and drinking is taken into account. The key findings through a dynamic panel model controlling for...

This paper uses individual data from Japan to explore how the circumstances of where a person resides are related to the degree of their investment in social capital. Controlling for unobserved area-specific fixed effects and various individual characteristics, I found; (1) Not only that...

This paper explores the relationship of social capital to self-rated health status in Japan, and how this is affected by the labor market. Data of 3075 adult participants in the 2000 Social Policy and Social Consciousness (SPSC) survey were used. Controlling for endogenous bias, the main finding...

This paper attempts to examine how social trust influences human capital formation using prefectural level data in Japan. To this end, I constructed a proxy for social trust, based on the Japanese General Social Surveys. After controlling for socioeconomic factors, I found that social trust...

Since the end of the 1990s, local governments in Japan have enacted Information Disclosure Ordinances, which require the disclosure of official government information. This paper uses Japanese prefecture-level data for the period 1998?2004 to examine how this enactment affected the rate of...