College Quality and Earnings in the Japanese Labor Market

The motivations underlying the pursuit of college prestige in Japan presumes a labor market that rewards workers according to the quality of the college that they attended. Yet, studies that examine the relationship between college quality and earnings in Japan remain few and riddled with shortcomings. This paper examines the returns to college education among Japanese men. Using a 1995 cross-sectional data of Japanese workers, I find that college quality significantly improves earnings. My findings confirm that college quality plays a crucial role in shaping both incentives and earnings in the Japanese labor market. The paper also examines the so-called distinctive features of the Japanese labor market, and confirms the significant impact of tenure and firm-size on earnings, and the similarity in the earnings profiles between blue- and white-collar workers.human capital formation; returns to education

Japanese Labor Market Reform. Why Is It So Difficult?

Socially embedded features in Japanese markets and how market activities in Japan deviate from the West have attracted considerable attention from a wide range of scholars in the social sciences. But the period of economic stagnation following the burst of the bubble economy in 1990 has brought about a deluge of criticism and reform pressures focusing on restructuring, sometimes taken to be synonymous with the dismantling of the very same institutions that were once viewed as the pillars of Japan’s postwar economic expansion. Amidst the economic downturn, the benefits of social exchange in Japan are overshadowed by its costs, and there is mounting pressure that transactions must become more market driven. This paper examines how embedded features in the Japanese labor market impede the efficient mobility and allocation of workers. The gains from economic exchange may be many, and numerous economists and policy makers have proposed measures that facilitate the dismissal of workers to set the stage for a more fluid labor market. But a market that matured under the tradition of long-term employment governed by the norms of social exchange has yet to develop an infrastructure for job-seekers, and there remain numerous barriers that prevent the mobility of workers across different organizations.Social exchange; economic exchange; embeddedness; labor mobility; public policy

Divorce in Japan: Why It Happens, Why It Doesn’t

In this paper I address two critical questions about divorce in postwar Japan: Why is the divorce rate so low compared to other industrialized economies? And, Why is it rising? I examine divorce in the context of institutional change, and discuss how the rising divorce rate in Japan is an outcome of the dynamic interactions between economic development and demographic change at the macro-level, and changes in social norms and attitudes that govern the behavior of individuals at the micro-level. The divorce rate in Japan is rising because there is a tradeoff between marital stability and gender equality. The drive towards equal status between the sexes narrows the dependency between the spouses, and offsets the costs and benefits of marriage. Lower dependency allows greater voice, and lowers the cost of exiting a marriage. The diversity of family forms such as civil unions and cohabitation allows couples to choose alternatives to marriage, which in turn weakens the institution of marriage. Alternatively, the divorce rate in Japan is low compared to the U.S. and Europe because dependency between the spouses is greater, alternatives to marriage are fewer, and the legacy of the traditional gender division of labor continues to influence the actions and attitudes of men and women.Japan; institutional change; divorce; gender; norms; dependency; cohabitation; marriage; children.

Are Sons and Daughters Substitutable? A Study of Intra-household Allocation of Resources in Contemporary Japan

Gender inequality in educational attainment remains a salient feature of contemporary Japanese society. This inequality lies not at the high school level but at the university level. Equal numbers of men and women advance to high school, but a significantly lower proportion of women advance to four-year universities relative to men. Starting from government statistics which report that Japanese parents aspire to university education more for their sons than for their daughters, I argue that the gender gap in the university advancement rate in Japan stems in part from differences in how parents allocate resources within the household depending on the gender of their children. From the individuals' perspective, the gender composition of their siblings should therefore alter the ways in which resources are allocated to them. Using a 1995 cross-sectional sample of men and women between the ages of 20 and 70 in Japan, I test the null hypothesis that the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) between an additional brother versus an additional sister with respect to the probability that an individual advances to university or not is equal to unity, i.e. MRS = 1 implies that brothers and sisters are perfectly substitutable and that parents allocate resources equally amongst their sons and daughters. My results show that the null hypothesis is rejected for women but cannot be rejected for men: It is not sibship size per se that depresses women's likelihood of university advancement, but the number of brothers in the household. My findings lend support to the position that intra-household resources in Japan are likely to be allocated in favor of sons and away from daughters.human capital formation; economics of the family; quality-quantity tradeoff of children; gender inequality

Does Examination Hell Pay Off? A Cost-Benefit Analysis of "Ronin" and College Education in Japan

College-bound students in Japan undergo a process of intense preparation known as examination hell. An extreme manifestation of examination hell is the ronin phenomenon. Typically thirty percent of students choose the ronin option under which they spend years in addition to high school preparing for the next yearfs college entrance examinations. Using the mean scores of the entrance examinations as a measure of college quality, I find that college quality significantly improves the internal rate of return (IRR) to college education among the sample of male graduates in Japan. Ronin increases earnings indirectly by improving the quality of the college attended. I also show that the IRR with respect to ronin is one of diminishing returns. On average, the number of ronin years which maximizes the IRR is found to be somewhere between one and two years.Human capital formation; economics of education; examination hell; ronin; cost-benefit analysis

Almost all standard Lagrangian tori in C^n are not Hamiltonian volume minimizing

In 1993, Y.-G. Oh proposed a problem whether standard Lagrangian tori in C^n are volume minimizing under Hamiltonian isotopies of C^n. In this article, we prove that most of them do not have such property if the dimension n is greater than two. We also discuss the existence of Hamiltonian non-volume minimizing Lagrangian torus orbits of compact toric Kahler manifolds.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn, as it is now incorporated into arXiv:1512.0194

Impediments to the Productive Employment of Labor in Japan

We examine a number of personnel practices, laws and regulations that lower the supply of labor in the Japanese economy. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of impediments, those that restrict the movement of labor between firms, and those that discourage women from participating to a greater extent. Using other OECD countries and especially the United States as a benchmark, we estimate that removal of these barriers would increase the productive labor supply in Japan by some 13 to 18 percent and thus could raise the potential growth rate of the Japanese economy by roughly 1% per annum over a ten-year period.labor mobility; gender