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...

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...

Panel data regressions for 24 OECD countries showed that the less corrupt a society is, the lower the total suicide rate. This effect was approximately three times larger for males than for females. It follows that corruption has a detrimental effect on social well-being.

Using Japanese panel data for 2006-2009, this study attempts to examine how the pass rate of law school students taking the new bar examination influences the number of applicants for the law school in the following years. The major finding is that the higher the law school student pass rate,...

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...

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...

Using panel data for 24 (OECD) countries during the period 1980–2004 this study examines how social trust affects fertility. The major finding through the random effects approach is that the social trust increases the fertility rate. A 1% rise in the trust rate leads to an increase in...

This paper explores, using Japanese panel data for the years 1988–2009, how externalities from congestion and human capital influence deaths caused by chronic illnesses. Major findings through fixed effects 2SLS estimation were as follows: (1) during the first-half period 1988-98, the number...

Using cross-country data, this paper examines the influence of government transparency on changing views regarding nuclear energy before and after Japan’s natural and nuclear disasters of 2011. Empirical results show that transparency increases the rate of favor for nuclear energy.

We analyze the effect of a wife’s human capital on her husband’s earnings, using individual-level data for Japan in the period 2000–2003. We find a positive association between a wife’s education and her husband’s earnings, which can be attributed to the assortative mating effect as...