The 158th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, January 19, 2024 13:30 to 15:00
Place Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University. http://www.osipp.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/about-osipp/where-we-are/
Conference Room , 6th floor, Osaka School of International Public Policy Building, Toyonaka Campus.
Presenter Mirka Zvedelikova, Institute of Social Economic Research, Osaka University.
Title: "Husband’s Retirement and Housework Burden: Unpacking Gender Dynamics in Japanese Marriages"
Abstract:
Japanese wives traditionally shoulder the homemaking burden while the husbands engage in paid labor. This study examines the shift in housework
distribution in Japanese married couples following the husbands’ retirement and the related change in time availability. Using household panel data from
2011-2023, a dynamic staggered DID design is employed to examine up to five years surrounding retirement. The total time spent on chores increases
following husbands’ retirement and continues to rise over time. Wives’ share of weekly chores drops temporarily, as reported by their husbands but not
themselves, revealing a conflict in the perception of the burden. The distribution of domestic labor largely fails to turn more equitable after the husband retires.
Moreover, elderly households depend on wives’ chores contributions, thus facing a potential welfare loss in case wives lose the ability to do housework.
The 157th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, December 15, 2023 13:30 to 15:00
Place Held online
Presenter Masaaki Higashijima, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo.
Title: "Do Elections Change Political Attitudes in Autocracies? Identification through the Staggered Introduction of Local Elections in Kazakhstan"
Abstract:
Scholars have studied authoritarian elections primarily from the dictators' perspective: Competitive elections help autocrats to improve governance by grasping grass-roots popular preferences. However, how competitive elections alter the public's views on the regime is underexplored, despite the fact that popular perceptions serve as micro foundations of such information mechanisms. To fill this gap, we conduct a survey in Kazakhstan to examine the impact of local elections on citizens' attitudes toward local elites and politics. We exploit the staggered introduction of local multi-candidate elections due to past turnovers of appointed village chiefs for causal identification, utilizing the item count technique, conjoint analysis, and anchoring vignettes for measuring political attitudes accurately in autocratic contexts. We find that those who have experienced their first-ever election express higher levels of political efficacy but report more frequent experiences of bribing local officials. Also, our conjoint experiment suggests that people do neither punish or reward their village leaders' policy responsiveness even after experiencing the first multi-candidate election. The overall results indicate that local multi-candidate elections in autocracies may make citizens think that their voice is heard but do not necessarily change popular evaluations of their leaders and even induce negative sentiments toward the quality of government.
The 156th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, November 17, 2023 13:30 to 15:00
Place Held online
Presenter Dongya Koh, Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University.
Title: "On the Welfare Cost of Constrained Female Labor Supply"
Abstract:
Female labor is widely recognized as one of the most important consumption insurance mechanisms for a household facing income risks. Despite its acknowledged importance, our empirical evidence, based on data from the Panel Study of Income and Dynamics (PSID), demonstrates that a significant proportion of U.S. households encounter limitations in their ability to use both intensive and extensive margins of female labor supply as insurance when the male household head confront with an unemployment shock. One common constraint on the intensive margin pertains to the current wife's working hours beyond which households find it difficult to make flexible adjustments. A critical constraint on the extensive margin relates to the age and number of children in the household. The presence of such constraints on the female labor supply often leads to precautionary savings as an alternative insurance, potentially resulting in lower consumption. This study examines the welfare cost of constraints on female labor supply, shedding light on the potential welfare gains achievable by easing these restrictions through policy interventions.
The 155th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, October 20, 2023 13:30 to 15:00
Place Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University. http://www.osipp.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/about-osipp/where-we-are/
Conference Room , 6th floor, Osaka School of International Public Policy Building, Toyonaka Campus.
Presenter Yukari Iwanami, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo.
Title: "Foreign Nuclear Deployments and the Success or Failure of Extended Nuclear Deterrence"
Abstract:
The success of extended nuclear deterrence is often believed to hinge on the credibility of the nuclear patron’s retaliatory threats, and some protégés agree to host the patron’s nuclear weapons on their territory in the hope that their presence would enhance extended deterrence. However, few theoretical studies provide a mechanism of how foreign-deployed nuclear weapons would enhance the credibility of retaliation and dissuade a potential aggressor from attacking the host state. Using a game-theoretic model, I demonstrate that the possibility that a nuclear war is contained within the host state’s region (i.e., decoupling) will reduce the likelihood that the patron state would abandon the host state in an event of a nuclear attack. Yet the same possibility might increase the host state’s fear that the patron state is emboldened to escalate the level of violence, dragging the host state into an unwanted nuclear war. If the potential aggressor believes that the host state makes concessions so as not to be entrapped into a nuclear war the patron initiates, deterrence may fail even though the patron has the willingness to bear the cost of a regional nuclear war. Accordingly, the credibility of the patron’s retaliatory threats does not suffice to ensure the success of extended deterrence: the host state’s resolve as well as the patron’s reassurance are required.
The 154th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, July 21, 2023 13:30 to 15:00
Place Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University.http://www.osipp.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/about-osipp/where-we-are/
Conference Room, 6th floor, Osaka School of International Public Policy Building, Toyonaka Campus.
Presenter Ryuichi Tanaka, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo.
Title: "The Cost of Relax-oriented Education on Japanese Labor Market Performance"
Abstract:
Does Yutori (relaxed) education could lead to better or worse labor market outcomes? By comparing the people born in the same year but have different lengths of exposure to the relax-oriented curriculum in the 1980s, this paper studies the impact of Japanese curriculum-reducing scholastic ability on people's labor market performance. We discover that individuals exposed to more years of relaxed education had less favorable results (i.e., lower earnings, higher probability of being unemployed, and lower probability of obtaining full-time occupation). The mechanism of their poor performance includes lower educational attainment. Our results hold up after excluding other explanations and are robust under various sensitivity testing.
The 153rd meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, June 16, 2023 13:30 to 15:00
Place Held online
Presenter Takenobu Yuki, Graduate School of Economics, Tohoku University.
Title: "Is supporting war profitable for investors? Evidence from Tokyo Stock Exchange during Second Sino-Japanese War and Pacific War''
Abstract:
In the conduct of war, resources must be allocated to military-related sectors. In World War II, the war was conducted under government control and command economies in many countries. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that in countries where the allocation of resources was mainly conducted by the market, the war was carried out in a manner that did not interfere with market mechanisms as much as possible. In particular, it is pointed out that in Japan, policies were implemented to maintain the functioning of the stock market and to attract funds to the military industry.
So, was it also in the interest of investors to invest in and hold stocks related to the conduct of the war? If so, then the war would have been economically beneficial not only to the government but also to the people. Thus, for the parties conducting the war, political pressure to end the war from within would not work, which could increase and prolong the scale of the war.
In this paper, we constructed a dataset of daily individual stocks available in the Japanese wartime period. Using that data set, we performed structural change tests to analyze the relationship between wartime events and stock price movements. We also calculated portfolios and analyzed whether the inflow of funds into military stocks was desirable for investors. Furthermore, we compared the results of this estimation with the actual portfolios of life insurance companies, which were leading institutional investors at the time.
The 152nd meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, May 19, 2023 13:30 to 15:00
Place Held online
Presenter Noritaka Kudoh, Department of Economics, Nagoya University.
Title: "Hours of Work and the Labor Share''
Abstract:
This paper challenges the consensus in the literature that labor supply factors play no role in understanding the labor share of income. We develop a simple dynamic general equilibrium model with search-matching frictions in the labor market, endogenous work hours, and capital. An increase in productivity reduces work hours through the income effect without reducing output. This reduces the labor share as income grows. Our quantitative analysis shows that productivity improvement explains both the downward trend in the U.S. labor share and the decline in work hours.
The 151st meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, April 21, 2023 13:30 to 15:00
Place Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University. http://www.osipp.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/about-osipp/where-we-are/
Conference Room 6th floor, Osaka School of International Public Policy Building, Toyonaka Campus.
Presenter Takuro Yamashita, Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University
Title: "Information Design in Repeated Interaction'' (joint with Joao Correia da Silva, University of Porto)
Abstract:
How does a long-term relationship affect communication among relevant economic entities? In this paper, we study dynamic information design in repeated interaction, where the state is imperfectly persistent. We observe that dynamics introduces a novel distortion relative to the static counterpart. Even if both parties' preferences are aligned in some state, revealing that state (which is myopically optimal for the informed) could make it difficult to persuade the uninformed in future periods (when the state switched to those with preference misalignment). This motif can distort the information in two different ways. If the state is moderately persistent (and the parties are moderately patient), then the optimal mechanism exhibits ``inefficient pessimism''; while if the state is much persistent, then it exhibits ``inefficient optimism''. Methodologically, we argue that a duality-based approach in solving dynamic information design could be more tractable than a more standard approach.