Abstract: This paper provides an axiological foundation of a class of sufficientarian principles that are based on the individual transformed well-being gains and losses from a threshold level. The ideas underlying these principles have their origins in the literature on population ethics. We characterize this class by showing that its members are the only principles that possess some intuitively appealing properties. One of these conditions explicitly expresses the absolute priority to be given to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous earlier sufficientarian approaches. In addition, we examine well-established conditions that prescribe the consequences of progressive transfers and identify the subclass of our principles that satisfy the requisite requirements.

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

幹事/Organizer：釜賀浩平/Kohei Kamaga

言語/Language：日本語/Japanese

Abstract: This paper provides an axiomatic analysis of sufficientarianism in a variable-population setting. We propose the class of generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings that extend the orderings introduced by Bossert, Cato, and Kamaga (2020). The distinguishing feature of our new class is that its members exhibit constant critical levels that are allowed to differ from the threshold of sufficiency. Our basic axiom assigns absolute priority to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous other sufficientarian approaches. When combined with the well-known strong-Pareto principle and the assumption that there be a constant critical level, the axiom implies that the critical level cannot be below the threshold. The main results of the paper are characterizations of our new class and an important subclass. As a final result, we identify the generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings that permit us to avoid the repugnant conclusion and the sadistic conclusion.

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

幹事/Organizer：長谷部拓也/Takuya Hasebe

言語/Language：日本語/Japanese

Abstract: East Timor went through the surge of violence on the path to its independence gained in 2002. The violence left the newly born country scarred and stunted its economic development. Violence also adversely affects child development. This study estimates the effect of prenatal and postnatal exposures to violence on child health status by exploiting temporal and geographical variations in violence. We combine the individual-level data from Demographic and Health Survey conducted in 2003 with the data on timing and location of violence from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. Our results indicate heterogeneous prenatal impacts of violence exposures between boys and girls. We find that the exposure to violence during the first trimester of pregnancy decreases height for age z-scores by about 0.5 standard deviations and increases the probability of stunting by about 15 percentage points among boys, whereas no significant effects are found among girls. We also find no impact of postnatal exposure to violence among both boys and girls.

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

幹事/Organizer：釜賀浩平/Kohei Kamaga・孫明超/Mingchao Sun

言語/Language：英語/English

Abstract: It has been claimed that climate policies can be evaluated by the Pareto principle. However, climate policies lead to different identities and different numbers of future people. Even if one assumes that the number of future people is infinitely countable independently of policy choice, the problem is that there exists no natural one-to-one correspondence between the components of the compared alternatives. We use this non-existence as a motivation for insisting on impartiality in the sense of Strong anonymity. Strong anonymity is incompatible with Strong Pareto. The paper re-examines this incompatibility and investigates how far a Paretian principle can be extended without contradicting Strong anonymity. We show that Strong anonymity combined with four rather innocent axioms has two consequences: (i) There is sensitivity for a person's well-being if and only if a co-finite set of people are more than an ε (>0) better than this person, and (ii) adding people to the population cannot have positive social value.

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

幹事/Organizer：長谷部拓也/Takuya Hasebe・孫明超/Mingchao Sun

言語/Language：英語/English

Abstract: White collar exemption (WCE) exempts workers from overtime pay (OP) and work-hour schedules (WS). We estimate the causal effects of WCE on full-time employees in Japan, distinguishing the two exemptions based on the theory of compensating wage differentials. We combine coarsened exact matching with subclassification on propensity scores to optimize on the trade-offs between unbiasedness versus precision of estimates. We find that the WS exemption is shown to decrease wages and increase work hours, yet paradoxically decrease work satisfaction. There is some indication that in Japan, WCE has not lead to discretion at work, which may partly explain this puzzle.

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

幹事/Organizer：釜賀浩平/Kohei Kamaga・孫明超/Mingchao Sun

言語/Language：日本語/Japanese

Abstract: Reputation for a group matters. In this paper, we demonstrate that when consumers do not know the service quality of a supplier but know only the quality distribution in the group that the supplier belongs to, production externality occurs among suppliers within the group. Some suppliers' behavior changes productivity of others. Furthermore, the group may employ too much suppliers if these externalities are ignored. Then, we apply this model to the market for community health worker (CHW) service and show that hiring more CHWs looks desirable even though it is not so in reality because of externality.

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

幹事/Organizer：釜賀浩平/Kohei Kamaga・孫明超/Mingchao Sun

言語/Language：日本語/Japanese

Abstract: This study examines the welfare implications of minimum wage hikes in Japan using suicide mortality as a proxy for negative well-being. The possibility of competing income and unemployment effects provides a motivation for an empirical investigation. Our difference-in-differences regression framework exploits a minimum wage policy reform in Japan that was implemented in 2008, which mandated prefectures to incrementally increase their minimum wages to local living wages. We find that the reform contributed to a decrease in suicides by 4.58% that is concentrated among demographic groups with greater exposure to minimum wages. An analysis of the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions (2004-2016) suggests that increases in earned income in the absence of sizable adverse effects on labor at the intensive and extensive margins among low-wage earners could be an important mechanism driving these results. The study highlights the importance of assessing various tradeoffs in economic policy for well-being.

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

幹事/Organizer：長谷部拓也/Takuya Hasebe

言語/Language：英語/English

Abstract: On August 30 1999, Timor-Leste rejected a proposal for special autonomy in a referendum. This led to Timor-Leste's separation from Indonesia. The aftermath of the referendum resulted in widespread violence, mass destruction of property, and the forced displacement of families. We use the 1999 crisis to understand how exposure to violence affect individual trust towards neighbors, which is an important component of social capital. We combine violence data from the Suco Survey in Timor-Leste with household data from the 2007 Timor-Leste Survey Living Standards. OLS results suggest a small negative correlation between living in areas with high intensity of violence during the 1999 crisis and trust. Then, we employ an instrumental variables (IV) strategy to mitigate possible omitted variable bias concerns. IV results indicate a positive association between violence and trust.

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

幹事/Organizer：釜賀浩平/Kohei Kamaga・孫明超/Mingchao Sun

言語/Language：英語/English

Abstract: We empirically characterize how automobile demand varies over geographic space and how it affects the economic consequences of climate mitigation policies. We augment a discrete-continuous choice model in ways that account for geographic distribution of incomes, public transit, and portfolio preferences, and show that our model outperforms a naive random-coefficient model in explaining demand stickiness over geographic space. In particular, the model allows us to resolve two empirical puzzles in Japan: Overall price elasticity of demand for vehicle ownership increases with vehicle size; invariance of demand for hybrid vehicles with respect to public transit density. We also use the estimated model to demonstrate the economic significance of this spatial demand heterogeneity: Eco-car sharing outperforms feebates but underperforms carbon tax; The policy impact declines with a decrease in transit density more than the conventional model predicts; The naive model overstates the impact in rural areas wheareas understating it in urban areas.

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

幹事/Organizer：長谷部拓也/Takuya Hasebe

言語/Language：日本語/Japanese

Abstract

場所：ZOOM (Online)

Venue: ZOOM (Online)

言語/Language：英語/English