Electoral Commitment in Asymmetric Tax-competition Models

* Revised： [20-21 , 2020]This study examines the political process of tax competition among asymmetric countries, highlighting the role of the commitment to the electoral promises.The median voters deliberately elect a delegate whose preferences differ from their own (strategic delegation), which is self-enforcing under symmetric countries. We first show that the outcome of strategic delegation is replicated when the candidates do not make binding campaign promises in both countries, and the opposite scenario of the binding commitments to the platforms leads to the self-representation by the median voters. We then amplify the model by adding the pre-election stage where the citizens choose whether the credibility of election promises is critical, through subscription numbers of newspapers and social media which determine the cost of betrayal of the proposed platforms (or the lack of the proposal). We then show that, depending on the type of asymmetries under consideration, sufficient asymmetry or sufficiently equal income distribution generates the commitment to the election campaign promises as the equilibrium outcome

Die Wahl der Schriftsprache im öffentlich-administrativen Bereich im mehrsprachigen Luxemburg. Der Sprachgebrauch in Gemeindeblättern der kleineren Gemeinden

批判的社会言語学の探

An Experimental Study on Information Acquisition and Disclosure in a Cournot Duopoly Market

* Revised： [13-01 , 2013]This study experimentally investigates the interaction between firms’ information acquisition decisions and disclosure. In particular, I focus on a Cournot duopoly market under industry-wide demand uncertainty. The results demonstrate that acquiring industry-wide demand information improves firms’ production decisions in that firms can adjust their quantity levels depending on the market demand. However, disclosure diminishes a firm’s incentive to acquire such information. This is because once the information, which a firm acquired at a cost, is subsequently disclosed, a rival firm can take a free ride on the disclosed information and make a more informed decision. Hence, disclosure decreases the benefit of acquiring information for the disclosing firm. Taken together, although acquiring information improves production decisions, disclosure decreases the incentive to do so and thus, deteriorates a firm’s internal information environment. This leads to inefficient production, which in turn might have a substantial impact on market outcomes

Effects of Monetary Policy in a Model with Cash-in-Advance Constraints on R&D and Capital Accumulation

February 2020. Revised June 2020.To examine the effect of monetary policy on economic growth, we formulate an endogenous growth model with cash-in-advance constraints on R&D and capital accumulation as endogenous growth engines. Within this framework, we show that the relationship between economic growth and the nominal interest rate can be an inverted-U shape. Moreover, we demonstrate that the welfare-maximizing level of the nominal interest rate is larger than the growth rate-maximizing level of the nominal interest rate

Signaling under Double-Crossing Preferences

October 2020. Revised December 2020This paper provides a general analysis of signaling under doublecrossing preferences with a continuum of types. There are natural economic environments where indifference curves of two types cross twice, so that the celebrated single-crossing property fails to hold. Equilibrium exhibits a particular form of pooling: there is a threshold type below which types choose actions that are fully revealing and above which they choose actions that are clustered in possibly non-monotonic ways, with a gap separating these two sets of types. We also provide an algorithm to establish equilibrium existence by construction under mild conditions

Strategy-proof multi-object auction design : Ex-post revenue maximization with non-quasilinear preferences

May 2017. Revised January 2020A seller is selling multiple objects to a set of agents. Each agent can buy at most one object and his utility over consumption bundles (i.e., (object,transfer) pairs) need not be quasilinear. The seller considers the following desiderata for her mechanism, which she terms desirable: (1) strategy-proofness, (2) ex-post individual rationality, (3) equal treatment of equals, (4) no wastage (every object is allocated to some agent). The minimum Walrasian equilibrium price (MWEP) mechanism is desirable. We show that at each preference profile, the MWEP mechanism generates more revenue for the seller than any desirable mechanism satisfying no subsidy. Our result works for quasilinear type space, where the MWEP mechanism is the VCG mechanism, and for various non-quasilinear type spaces, some of which incorporate positive income effect of agents. We can relax no subsidy to no bankruptcy in our result for certain type spaces with positive income effect

Coordination and free-riding problems in the provision of multiple public goods

* Revised： [19-15 , 2019]This study considers the twin problems of free riding and coordination failure prevailing in the provision of multiple public goods with diminishing marginal returns in which the payoff-summaximising Pareto optimal outcome requires less-than-full contributions by group members. We examine theoretically and experimentally whether the provision of information on the demand for public goods helps overcome these problems and improves efficiency. We construct a game of two public goods, each with an upper bound on effective contributions. Theoretical analysis predicts that this information improves efficiency as it prompts efficiency concerned individuals to match the upper bound of each public good in equilibrium. The experimental results show countervailing effects of demand information,i.e.,it improves coordination but deteriorates the free-riding problem

Is Environmental Tax Harmonization Desirable in Global Value Chains?

* Revised： [19-13 , 2019]The spatial unbundling of parts production and assembly currently characterizes globalization, leading to the worldwide dispersion of pollution. We consider socially optimal (cooperative) environmental taxes in a two-country model of global value chains in which the location of both parts and assembly can differ. When unbundling costs are so high that parts and assembly must colocate in the pre-globalized world, pollution is spatially concentrated, and harmonizing environmental taxes maximizes global welfare. In contrast, with low unbundling costs triggering the dispersion of parts and thus pollution throughout the world as today, harmonization fails to maximize global welfare. Similar results hold when the two countries non-cooperatively choose their environmental taxes

Blood Type and Blood Donation Behavior

May 2018. Revised July 2018. Secondly Revised June 2020.We empirically investigated how voluntary helping behavior is influenced by the number of its potential recipients by using a nationwide survey in Japan (N = 1,333) and examining the relationship between blood type and blood donation behavior. It is generally known in Japan that type O blood can be medically transfused to individuals of all blood groups; therefore, the potential transfusion recipients’ number of the type O blood is the largest among the four blood groups. Our empirical analysis revealed that people with type O blood were more likely to have donated blood in the past than those with the other blood types. This association was stronger in a subsample of individuals who had knowledge relating to the above-mentioned widespread utility of type O blood. In addition, our empirical analysis arrested the concern that potential blood-type differences in altruistic attitudes might explain their differences in blood donation behavior, by confirming that type O blood was not significantly related to other altruistic behaviors (i.e., registration for bone-marrow donation, intention to donate organs, and making monetary donations) or attitudes (i.e., general trust, altruism, reciprocity, and agreeableness). After conducting further analyses, we concluded that the vast number of potential recipients of type O blood causes different patterns of Japanese people’s blood donation behavior across the four blood groups. This study added to the literature the real-world evidence concerning how having many potential recipients affect people’s behavior of providing common goods

Estimation of Weak Factor Models

April 2019. Revised March 2020.This paper proposes a novel estimation method for the weak factor models, a slightly stronger version of the approximate factor models of Chamberlain and Rothschild (1983), with large cross-sectional and time-series dimensions (N and T, respectively). It assumes that the kth largest eigenvalue of data covariance matrix grows proportionally to N^＜k＞ with unknown exponents 0 < _k 1 for k = 1,..., r. This is much weaker than the typical assumption on the recent factor models, in which all the r largest eigenvalues diverge proportionally to N. We apply the SOFAR method of Uematsu et al. (2019) to estimate the weak factor models and derive the estimation error bound. Importantly, our method yields consistent estimation of _k's as well. A finite sample experiment shows that the performance of the new estimator uniformly dominates that of the principal component (PC) estimator. We apply our method to analyze S&P500 firm security returns and find that the first factor is consistently near strong while the others are indeed weak. Another application demonstrates that forecasting bond yields based on our method outperforms that based on the PC