"Land Tenure Security and Home Maintenance: Evidence from Japan"

This paper considers two land tenure modes. leasehold and freehold. and models housing maintenance incentives under land tenure security in Japan. Compared with freeholders, leaseholders are equally likely to remain in the premises, but spend less on home maintenance, because leaseholders are not full residual claimants, even under land tenure security. The empirical results show that maintenance expenditures of leaseholders are about 30% lower than those of freeholders in the Japanese residential land market. Empirical evidence also indicates that leaseholders are equally likely to remain in their premises even when they undermaintain their dwellings.

"The Backward-bending Commute times of Married Women with Household Responsibility"

Though the existing literature provides evidence that married women choose short commutes because of low wages and household responsibilities, this theoretical paper shows that wives employed in highly paid positions also undertake short commutes and endogenously choose longer times for housework. In contrast, middle-class wives choose long commutes and undertake limited household chores. The results suggest that the commute times of wives follow a backward-bending pattern and there is a tradeo? between commute time and the hours devoted to housework in terms of wage rates. Using a sample of married women working full time from the 1993 Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, we obtain empirical evidence supporting these predictions.

"Homeless Networks and Geographic Concentration: Evidence from Osaka City"

Homeless people in Osaka City are geographically concentrated. The purpose of this paper is to examine this geographic concentration by focusing on homeless networks. The data we use contain information on Osaka City.s homeless population by census blocks. The estimated results of a spatial autoregressive model with autoregressive disturbances show that the homeless network is signi.cantly positive across census blocks. Networks exist in a homeless society.

"Homeless Networks: Testing Peer and Homed Networks Against Location Choice"

This paper examines the location choices of homeless people in Osaka City, and .nds them concentrated because of homeless networks. The paper also shows that different types of homeless networks operate in two different homeless groups: (1) peer networks that provide a social tie inside homeless communities are observed in groups that had not had work experience in the day labor market; (2) homed networks that provide a social tie outside homeless communities affect location choice in the expected way, although the effect is statistically insigni.cant in groups that had worked in the day labor market.

"Auction Price Formation with Costly Occupants: Evidence Using Data from the Osaka District Court"

Foreclosure properties sold at Japanese judicial auctions are delivered to buyers with an unclear title when occupants exist, because the foreclosure laws protect occupants from compulsory execution of auctions. The existence of occupants theoretically affects the auction price through two channels. First, it affects the reserve price, and this changes in auction price. Second, the number of bidders changes in response to changes in the reserve price that is controlled by occupants, and this changes the auction price. Using data from the Osaka District Court, we empirically find that the existence of occupants in properties reduces the auction price through two channels.

Homeless Networks: Testing Peer and Homed Networks Against Location Choice.

This paper examines the location choices of homeless people in Osaka City, and finds them concentrated because of homeless networks. The paper also shows that different types of homeless networks operate in two different homeless groups: (1) peer networks that provide a social tie inside homeless communities are observed in groups that had not had work experience in the day labor market; (2) homed networks that provide a social tie outside homeless communities affect location choice in the expected way, although the effect is statistically insignificant in groups that had worked in the day labor market

Fertility and the user cost of home ownership : Evidence from regional panel data

Cross-sectional data yield the interesting result that fertility rates and home ownership rates tend to correlate positively, while time-series data suggest an inverse (or no) relationship between them. Although these associations can be explained by observed economic variables, doubt remains as to whether these links are due to the existence of omitted regional and time effects. Thus, controlling for regional-specific fixed effects and nationwide common time effects, this paper tests the link between the user cost of home ownership, which is the purchase price of housing, and total fertility rates. The empirical results, which use a panel of Japanese regional aggregate data, suggest that the impact of user costs on fertility considerably decreased when compared with the pooled OLS regression result without controlling for the above effects, but remained significantly negative. In the Japanese context, the association between the number of children and home ownership seems to be complementary

The asymmetric housing wealth effect on childbirth

The literature has shown that an increase in housing wealth, driven by unexpected shocks to house prices, exerts a positive effect on the birthrates of homeowners. According to canonical models, a decrease in housing wealth has a symmetric negative impact on the fertility behavior of households. That is, housing gains and losses of the same size should have identical quantitative effects on fertility. In comparison, prospect theory suggests that people care more about housing losses than equivalent gains, leading to an asymmetric effect of housing wealth on the fertility decision. In our model, we weight the utility from childbirth by the utility from the price of housing, where the reference level is the house price in previous years. The theoretical model suggests that the probability of childbirth is kinked at a reference level of housing wealth and the wealth effects are discontinuously larger below this kink than above it. We test this theoretical prediction using longitudinal data on Japanese households. Consistent with this theoretical prediction, our empirical results show that the fertility responses of homeowners, as measured by the birth hazard rate, are substantially larger when housing wealth is below its reference level than when it is above its reference level

Housing subsidy or parental support: crowding-out effect of mortgage tax deduction

Children may receive monetary transfers from their parents to realize the dream of homeownership. This raises the question of whether transfers received decrease if governments also provide a homeownership-related subsidy. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine this question, using a sample of the Japanese home-buying households that are subsidized by a mortgage tax deduction (MTD) as a model case. In the empirical stage, we offer a test of the effect of the MTD on both the extensive (the probability of receiving transfers) and the intensive (the amount of transfers received) margins using the overall sample as well as subsample groups. The empirical results, which use the full sample, appear to indicate that the MTD has a tendency to crowd out transfers on both the extensive and the intensive margins. Subsample analysis demonstrates that the crowding-out effect is strengthened when parents\u27 behavior is influenced by a relatively strong altruistic motive and a relatively weak exchange motive

Homeless Networks and Geographic Concentration: Evidence from Osaka City

Homeless people in Osaka City are geographically concentrated. The purpose of this paper is to examine this geographic concentration by focusing on homeless networks. The data we use contain information on Osaka City\u27s homeless population by census blocks. The estimated results of a spatial autoregressive model with autoregressive disturbances show that the homeless network is significantly positive across census blocks. Networks exist in a homeless society