Cultures, Worldviews, and Intergenerational Altruism

This paper presents empirical evidence concerning effects of cultural differences on parents' attitudes toward children from unique U.S. and Japanese survey data. These data sets have been collected by Osaka University, and contain questions concerning worldviews and religions, hypothetical questions about parental behavior, and questions about socioeconomic variables. The data show that U.S. parents tend to be tougher than Japanese parents toward young children. Our evidence suggests that contents of worldview beliefs held by parents affect parents' attitudes toward children. Our empirical evidence also indicates that people who are confident about worldview beliefs tend to show tough attitudes toward their children. Because U.S. parents are much more confident than Japanese parents in worldview beliefs on the average, this cultural difference helps explain a substantial portion of the difference in parental attitudes between U.S. and Japanese parents

Rising aspirations dampen satisfaction

It is commonly believed that education is a good thing for individuals. Yet, its correlation with subjective well-being is most often only weakly positive, or even negative, despite the many associated better individual-level outcomes. We here square the circle using novel Japanese data on happiness aspirations. If reported happiness comes from a comparison of outcomes to aspirations, then any phenomenon raising both at the same time will have only a muted effect on reported well-being. We find that around half of the happiness effect of education is cancelled out by higher aspirations, and suggest a similar dampening effect for income

The impact of daily return limit and segmented clientele on stock returns in China

Mean and variance of daily type A and B stock returns in Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges are studied before and after these stocks were subject to a ± 10% daily return limit, and when investors' clientele were segmented, vs. merged. We find that imposing the ± 10% return limit significantly reduced the variance of type A stocks, but increased the variance of type B stocks. This puzzle appears to be related to different liquidity effects. Merging clienteles across stock types reduced their risk, increased mean return, and improved efficiency. Returns were generated primarily at the opening (type A) or trading day (type B) before the clienteles merged, but in a mixed format thereafter.China Anomalies Momentum Reversal Clientele

Worldviews and Altruistic Behavior: A Progress Report on Experimental Study

International audienceThe main purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of worldviews on individual altruistic behaviors toward anonymous others, through experimental researches conducted in churches and universities in Korea, Japan and the US. The experiments were designed to compare the results between Christians and non-Christians and among the Koreans, Japanese and Americans. We found a significant correlation between the worldview and the amount of donation among Christians in Japan and Korea. Among Korean and Japanese Christians, those who believe in punishments for any bad behaviors are less likely to donate. One possible interpretation is that the punishment-related worldview might be correlated with the perception of the origin of suffering. If respondents believe that suffering is resulted from one's own irresponsible deeds, they would be less willing to make a charitable donation to anonymous others. It should be noted that the small size of our samples hinders from drawing concrete comparisons between Christians and non-Christians and between countries. Our overall estimation results should be interpreted as hinting that worldviews might affect a set of rules that determine individual altruistic decision