Unlike the standard assumption that the degree of impatience, measured by the rate of time preference, is increasing in wealth, empirical studies support that impatience ismarginally decreasing. By introducing decreasing marginal impatience into the neoclassical monetary growth model _ la...

We consider situations where a society tries to efficiently allocate several homogeneous and indivisible goods among agents. Each agent receives at most one unit of the good. For example, suppose that a government wishes to allocate a fixed number of licenses to operate in its country to private...

"Strategy-proofness" is one of the axioms that are most frequently used in the recent literature on social choice theory. It requires that by misrepresenting his preferences, no agent can manipulate the outcome of the social choice rule in his favor. The stronger requirement of "group...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) gives foreign firms access to local labor and inputs, thereby harmonizing costs between foreign and domestic firms relative to exports. This paper investigates the welfare effects of such cost harmonization in strategic environments, finding that when the number...

This paper explores a panel data set matching establishment-based production statistics from Japan's Census of Manufacturers with wholesale price indices from the Bank of Japan, and Herfindahl indices from the Japan Fair Trade Commission. The data include annual observations over the period...

We address the local home environment externality conceptualized by Galor and Tsiddon (1997a; 1997b) in the two sector growth model of Lucas (1988). We show that this version of externality related to human capital accumulation process can be a source of indeterminacy.

We provide a simple model to investigate decisions about vertical separation. The key feature of this model is that more than one input is required for the final product of the downstream monopolist. We show that as the bargaining powers of independent complementary input suppliers grow larger,...

In this paper, we conduct a theoretical analysis of personal taxes (defined to include consumption and income taxes), describe and evaluate the past and present structure of personal taxes in Japan, and based on our findings, make a number of policy recommendations about how to reform personal...

Theory shows that vertical integration has contrasting two effects, efficiency and foreclosure effects. This study empirically estimates the relative size of these two effects. Unlike previous studies, I focus on a single vertical merger in order to use a panel dataset, and estimate its average...

In this paper, I survey the previous literature on the saving behavior of the aged in Japan and then present some survey data on the saving behavior of the aged in Japan that became available recently. To summarize the main findings of this paper, all previous studies as well as the newly...