Japanese Households Research Articles

Labor market outcomes of informal care provision in Japan

This paper examines the labor supply outcomes of family care provision for Japanese households in 2010, ten years after the introduction of the public long-term care insurance (LTCI) program. We found that family care provision for parents adversely affected labor market outcomes of main caregivers at home in terms of the probability of working, employment status and hours worked. The adverse effect was found to be more serious for female caregivers than for male caregivers. Moreover, our results suggest that the public LTCI program seems to only partially mitigate the disadvantages of the main caregivers for both males and females.

Trends in Japanese households' critical-metals material footprints

This study adopts the concept of material footprint (MF), an indicator for consumption-based material extraction via international trade, and identifies the relationship between the MFs of critical metals for low-carbon technologies – neodymium, cobalt, and platinum – and Japanese household consumption through a multiregional input–output approach using the global link input–output model. We focus solely on the impact of changes in consumption patterns caused by demographic change on the structures of the MFs from 2005 to 2035. As a result, the total MFs of neodymium, cobalt, and platinum in 2035 are estimated to be 11%, 6.6% and 4.7% lower than in 2005, respectively. In terms of commodity sectors, the MFs of the three metals induced by “passenger motor cars” are estimated to decrease most between 2005 and 2035. Finally, we carried out an assessment of the extent to which the products dealt with under current Japanese recycling laws cover the MFs calculated for 2035. This indicates that continued enforcement of the recycling laws can play an important role in alerting consumers to the MFs of critical metals, particularly neodymium. For improving the accuracy of the above estimates, further studies need to incorporate other future trends like technologies and trade.

Weather Effects on Household Demand for Coffee and Tea in Japan

ABSTRACTThis paper estimates the weather effects on household demand for coffee and tea in Japan using the linear approximate quadratic almost ideal demand system model (LA/QUAIDS). Five expenditure shares and prices demand equations for coffee and tea group: green tea, black tea, tea beverage, coffee, and coffee beverage are estimated for two or more households in 49 cities, for the period January 2000 through March 2012. Empirical results show that demand for green tea, black tea, and tea beverage are own‐price elastic while coffee and coffee beverage are own‐price inelastic. The expenditure elasticity estimates that green tea and black tea are luxuries, while tea beverage, coffee and coffee beverage are necessities in the Japanese household. In addition, temperature has a positive effect on demand for tea beverage and coffee beverage and has a negative effect on green tea, black tea and coffee throughout the year. [EconLit citations: D12, Q11].

New Evidence on Intra-Household Allocation of Resources in Japanese Households

This paper examines intra-household allocation of resources to gain insight into family relationships and gender bias in Japanese households. We take the Engel curve approach to examine how adult consumption is affected by the presence of a child, either a boy or a girl, in the family. Empowered by diary-based high quality spending data from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, our empirical results show that adult consumption is significantly reduced in households with children; furthermore, gender bias is not observed in total adult expenditures, while responses of adult clothing expenses to the presence of a child are significantly different between a boy and a girl: spending on a father's clothing is reduced when the child is a school-aged daughter, while spending on a mother's clothing decreases when a school-aged son is in the home. Our analysis also shows that after the early 2000s girls receive a larger share of spending for children's clothing as well as for high school education than boys.

Japanese Household Demand for Fresh Fruits, 1991-2006

Japanese Household Demand for Fresh Fruits, 1991-2006

Demand Analysis of Non-Alcoholic Beverages in Japan

This paper estimates the demand of non-alcoholic beverages in Japanese household using the linear approximation quadratic almost ideal demand system model (LA/QUAIDS). Eight expenditure shares and prices demand equations for non-alcoholic beverage group: green tea, black tea, tea beverage, coffee, coffee beverage, fruit and vegetable juice, carbonated beverage and milk are estimated for two or more households in forty-nine cities for the period January 2000 through March 2013. The expenditure elasticity results indicate that green tea (2.320), black tea (1.357), coffee (1.090) and fruit and vegetable juice (1.019) are luxury goods while tea beverage (0.836), coffee beverage (0.896), carbonated beverage (0.844) and milk (0.677) are necessities in the Japanese household. The demographic effects reveal that people under the age of 18 prefer milk (5.928) than any other beverages whereas elderly people tend to drink more green tea (24.427). Moreover, temperature effects shows it has mostly positive effect on demand for tea beverage, coffee beverage, fruit and vegetable juice, and carbonated beverage and negative effect on green tea, black tea, and coffee in most of the months.

Do Consumers Learn from Their Own Experiences?

It is natural to think that a household may learn from its own experiences and subsequently increase savings. This paper tests empirically the hypothesis that Japanese households learn from their experiences of large expenditure and increase their targets for precautionary savings after such experiences. The results imply that households raise their targets for precautionary savings by 4–5 percent of annual income in response to such experiences. Moreover, data are consistent with the argument that targets for savings affect actual savings. Assuming this holds, the results in this paper suggest that consumers may increase their actual savings following large expenditure.

CHARACTERISTICS OF JAPANESE HOUSEHOLD’S DEMAND

This paper estimates and analyzes the characteristics of Japanese household’s demand on goods and services, i.e. (1) Food, (2) Housing, (3) Fuel, light and water charges, (4) Furniture and household utensils, (5) Clothes and footwear, (6) Medical care, (7) Transportation and communication, (8) Education, (9) Reading and recreation, and (10) Other living expenditure. This paper applies Linear Expenditure System (LES) model and seemingly uncorrelated regression (SUR) estimation method. Put (10) other living expenditure aside, this paper has exhibited some conclusions. First, increases in income (above supernumerary income) will be proportionally allocated more for (1) Food, (5) Clothes and footwear, (9) Reading and recreation, (7) Transportation and communication and (8) Education. Second, both demand and cross-price elasticities are inelastic. Third, demand on (4) Furniture and household utensils, (5) Clothes and footwear and (6) Education are income elastic. Keywords: elasticity, Linear Expenditure System (LES), Seemingly Uncorrelated Regression (SUR)

Do households misperceive the benefits of energy-saving actions? Evidence from a Japanese household survey

Using a household survey conducted in a suburb of Tokyo, we examine whether individuals properly perceive the benefits of energy-saving actions. A bivariate regression shows that, on average, individuals overestimate the benefits. The tendency to overestimate is robust to controlling for individual and home characteristics. Our results are contrary to those of Attari et al. (2011), who found that individuals in the U.S. tended to underestimate the benefits of energy-saving activities. The difference in our results suggests that the provision of information about the benefits of energy saving may be an effective policy to address global warming issues in one country but not necessarily in all countries. We also find that the magnitude of overestimation is greatest among young single males, whereas the benefits perceived by older married females are the smallest. This result suggests that the provision of tailored information (i.e., highly personalized and specific information) can be an effective intervention even in Japan.

Risk as Feelings? Rare Disasters and Financial Decisions

We investigate whether households’ decisions for risk-hedging of rare disasters depend on their past experiences. Japanese earthquake experience offers a natural subject to study risk perception because such an event is exogenous and cannot be predicted or controlled. Moreover, natural disasters are local events, such that we can use geographic locations to proxy for earthquake experience from different aspects. Using data from a survey on Japanese households, we find that households who have previously experienced catastrophic earthquakes are more likely to purchase and allocate a larger fraction of their financial wealth to life and property insurance. Further results suggest that the experience effect works by disproportionately affecting households’ future beliefs, rather than their risk attitudes.

Inner conflict between nuclear power generation and electricity rates: A Japanese case study

Since the March 11 earthquake, Japanese households have been facing a trade-off problem between decreasing dependency on nuclear power generation and avoiding an increase in electricity rates. We analyze this inner conflict quantitatively, adopting two economic–psychological approaches: First, we note that the trade-off causes cognitive dissonance after making a choice that results in a wider desirability gap between the chosen and rejected alternatives. Second, the consumer surplus improves by 11.2% with a no-choice option for suspending judgment in the presence of cognitive dissonance. Third, individual characteristics such as gender and annual household income are significantly correlated with both cognitive dissonance and a preference for the no-choice option.

Strategic interaction between inter vivos gifts and housing acquisition

This paper models the interdependence of parental inter vivos gifts and children’s home purchases when informal care affects decision making. We use data from Japanese households who purchased a detached house in an urban area to test this strategic interaction. Considering both censoring and endogeneity of inter vivos gifts, which are identified by information on formal care, our preferred results demonstrate that inter vivos gifts do not significantly increase the purchase price of housing. Theory suggests that this occurs when informal care tends to be a heavy burden for children. However, subsample analysis of young home buyers indicates that the empirical results are consistent with the literature: children who receive parental gifts tend to purchase a higher-priced dwelling. One potential explanation is that relatively young adult children are less likely to take charge of care obligations, and accordingly, parental gifts are only expected to relax their liquidity constraints. Subsample analysis appears to indicate that the underlying motivation of parental gifts is influenced by the timing of children’s home purchase decisions.

Attitudes toward nuclear power and energy-saving behavior among Japanese households

We conducted Internet surveys to evaluate Japanese attitudes toward nuclear power and energy-saving behavior after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster. In the first part of the paper, we examined the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and acceptance of nuclear power in light of global warming. Like previous researchers, we found that nuclear power was supported more by males and those who have spent longer in education. However, nuclear power received less support from seniors. In the second part of the paper, we examined the relationship between electricity demand and acceptance of nuclear power. We find that opponents of nuclear power use electrical appliances less intensively at home and reduced their electricity use during the power shortage period after the nuclear accident. By contrast, supporters of nuclear power use electrical appliances more intensively and did not engage in energy-saving behavior. The elasticity of electricity demand explains attitudes toward nuclear power.

Changes in the carbon footprint of Japanese households in an aging society.

As the aging and low birthrate trends continue in Japan, and as changes in the working population and consumption patterns occur, new factors are expected to have an impact on consumption-based greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We present the impacts of changes in the composition of Japanese households on GHG emission structures using current (2005) consumption-based accounting on the commodity sectors that are expected to require priority efforts for reducing emissions in 2035. This is done using the Global Link Input-Output model (GLIO) and domestic household consumption data and assuming that recent detailed consumption expenditures based on the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) will continue into the future. The results show that consumption-based GHG emissions derived from Japanese household consumption in 2035 are estimated to be 1061 Mt-CO2eq (4.2% lower than in 2005). This study can be used to reveal more information and as a resource in developing policies to more meticulously and efficiently reduce emissions based on emission and import rates for each domestic and overseas commodity supply chain.

Intergenerational Transfers and Asset Inequality in Japan: Empirical Evidence from New Survey Data

This paper quantitatively examines the impact of intergenerational transfers on asset inequality among Japanese households. We estimate an intergenerational asset transfer function with various control variables, using a unique micro dataset taken from a survey conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute, Cabinet Office. Employing three different models, a Tobit model, an interval regression model and an ordered probit model, to ensure that our results are independent of the specific econometric approach used, we investigate whether asset transfers received are correlated with households’ financial strength. We find that higher income households are likely to receive larger asset transfers. However, the contribution of intergenerational transfers to asset inequality appears to be small.

Should the Japanese tax system be more progressive? An evaluation using the simulated SMCFs based on the discrete choice model of labor supply

This study proposes a method to obtain the social marginal costs of public funds (SMCF) that allows for heterogeneity on a household basis as well as labor supply responses along both the extensive and the intensive margins. To demonstrate our methodology, we take the example of the 1999 national income tax reform in Japan and evaluate it by estimating the SMCFs for changing marginal tax rates in different income brackets. We estimate the discrete choice model (DCM) of labor supply using a 1997 data set of Japanese households, and we use the estimates to generate the SMCFs with a DCM micro-simulation. We evaluate the simulated SMCFs with various distributional weights and find that the value of the SMCF for a 1 % increase in the marginal tax rate in any given income bracket decreases as we move across brackets from the bottom to the top. This finding suggests that the national government should have made the Japanese income tax system more progressive rather than less progressive as carried out in the 1999 reform. Our method is readily transferrable to tax reforms in other countries as well.

3403 アイデア創出支援システムを用いた浴槽掃除ロボットの開発(OS9-1 感性と設計(1),OS9 感性と設計)

Many people feel cleaning bathtub is a great deal of housework today. Moreover, it is dangerous especially for elderly people to clean a bathtub since they may be injured by slipping on the bathroom floor. However, Japan is a most aged society in the world, so that elderly people have to do housework in many Japanese household. On the other hand, an understanding customer requirement is most important for a conceptual design. Successful companies are providing the highest quality service by which customer receives a satisfaction through the Kando experience. Thus, an element of customer satisfaction is necessary for the great success in business. Therefore, authors have proposed the Idea Creation Support System (ICSS). In this paper, we develop a robot cleans a bathtub automtically by using ICSS. At first, we discussed a concept of the bathtub cleaning robot based on questionnaires and the patents search about existing bathtub cleaning machines. Next, the first prototype of the bathtub cleaning robot was developed and could clean a bathtub through the experiment for validation. Based on validation of this prototype, we tried to define concept by ICSS again. In the ICSS, words of the Kando quality were gotten by world cafe. Moreover, we calculated demand quality weight and quality element weight calculated through Quality Function Deployment. Thereby, we drew on quality elements for the bathtub cleaning robot.

Comment on “Who Faces Higher Prices? An Empirical Analysis Based on Japanese Homescan Data”

Abe and Shiotani (2014) are concerned with household-level price differences amonghouseholds. This type of research has two different roots of investigation.The first is toconstruct household-level consumer price indices (CPIs) with different household char-acteristics, namely, the age of the head of household, household income, and householdlocation, for example, Kitamura (2008). The second is to examine the relationshipbetween the household-level actual prices and life-cycle consumption and time alloca-tion behavior, for example, Aguiar and Hurst (2007). This paper follows the second lineof research. It is quite sensible to investigate whether Aguiar and Hurst type of observa-tions can be found in Japan.The advantages of homescan data over the Retail Price Survey conducted by the Japa-nese Government lie in the former’s rich information on the varieties of goods, the pur-chase prices paid by individual households, and the frequency of shop visits. At themoment, Abe and Shiotani construct shopping behavior-related variables, such as thenumber of different stores, a Herfindahl–Hirschman index of store shares, the totalnumber of goods bought by a household, a bargain index, a store chain index, and aquality index, and use these indicators as explanatory variables in the household-levelprice index.Although Abe and Shiotani’s use of this information conveys some interestingaspects of the Japanese household behavior, there could be some alternative ways to usethe information from the homescan data. For example, Abe and Shiotani argue thatelderly people face higher prices than the young, which is contrary to the results ofAguiar and Hurst (2007). They provide some further analyses of this interesting finding,by finding that the elderly spend more at specialized stores (presumably mom-and-popretail shops) and supermarkets, and less at drug stores and home_improvement_storescompared to the young.The regression results in Abe and Shiotani’s (2014) Table 7 showthat store choice can explain part of the price-level differentials between households.However, Abe and Shiotani note from their Table 8 that the elderly face higher pricesthan the young even within the same store type and that the mechanism behind thehigher prices among the elderly needs further investigation.

Household consumption smoothing through equity investment in the USA and Japan: an empirical examination of the consumption-capital asset pricing model (C-CAPM)

The C-CAPM is examined-based on a constant relative risk aversion utility function. The subjective discount rate (beta) and coefficient of risk aversion (gamma) are estimated by recursive generalised method of moments estimation over the 1987:12–2010:7 period for the USA and Japan. In contrast with previous empirical research, the findings show that the C-CAPM fits well for both countries yet for different time periods (1987:12–1996:11 and 1987:12–2001:1 for the USA and Japan respectively). However, during the sample period, the gamma coefficient estimated for the USA was high (above eight) compared with that for Japan (around one). I also find that there is no relationship between USA stock market returns and Japanese household consumption. Parameter stability tests are also performed for the model estimated using the full sample and breakpoints were found in the models.

The influences of financial and non-financial factors on energy-saving behaviour: A field experiment in Japan

This study examines the influences of financial and non-financial factors on electricity-conservation behaviour. A random sample of 236 Japanese households participated in the field experiment and the participants were offered two interventions, such as monetary rewards, depending on their reduction in electricity consumption and comparative feedback. The average saving rates of the (i) reward-intervention group (5.9%) and the (ii) reward with comparative feedback group (8.2%) are statistically larger than those of the (iii) control group (1.7%). Our study demonstrates the following. First, our econometric analysis confirmed a significant response by households to financial incentives but a more inconclusive response to the treatment that provided non-financial, additional information. Second, we found a positive influence of treatment externalities across time and households on energy saving. Third, there is a heterogeneous treatment effect in the reward-intervention group, with the households having a high New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) score being more likely to respond to the reward programme and save electricity than those that do not. Finally, and most interestingly, differences in responses to the questionnaire before and after the experiment suggest that the participants had underestimated the marginal costs of saving electricity before they actually started to do so.