Social Security and Earlier Retirement in Japan: Cross-Sectional Evidence

The estimated elasticity of the probability of retirement with respect to social security retirement benefits declines as individuals age. The negative impact of social security retirement benefits on full-time workers is much greater than the impact on part-time workers for all age groups. Earnings test in Japan is, therefore, more effective on full-time workers than part-time workers among the elderly. Social security retirement benefits also provide the elderly with an incentive to prolong their unemployment status. The marginal effect of the market unemployment rate on full-time work is significantly larger than that on part-time work and both effects are negative. The e1asticit.y of retirement with respect to the market unemployment rate for those in their 60's is two to three times larger than those aged 70 and over. Retirement of those in their GO'S is quite responsive to changes in labor market condition.

Part-time Employment of Married Women and Fertility in Urban Japan

Previous studies of female labor force participation in Japan often show that the estimates of female wage rates are "negative" in their single-equation models of labor supply. Based on the common belief that the substitution effect dominates the income effect for female labor supply, to disentangle the problem of the inconsistency is, therefore, necessary for the purpose of predicting the behavior of female labor supply and for guiding policy actions. In this paper, we have estimated a logit model of married women's part-time employment and a fertility equation in the context of a simultaneous-equation model. By specifically differentiating part-time employed married women from full-time employed married women,we find that the structural coefficients of the part-time labor supply are significantly different from those of the full-time labor supply in terms of elasticity. However, contrary to the result of married women's full-time employment, we find little interdependency between married women's decisions to work as part-time employees and their fertility in urban Japan.

Estimation of a Simultaneous Model of Married Women's Labor Force Participation and Fertility in Urban Japan

A strong and negative correlation between married women's labor force participation and fertility has been witnessed in Japan in past decades. Relative to empirical studies of a traditional single equation on female labor supply, there exist few econometric studies dealing explicitly witha possible interdependency between married women's labor supply and fertility behaviors in urban Japan. Using the recently published 1980 Population Census of Japan, we have estimated a simultaneous-equation model of married women's labor force participation and fertility in urban Japan. Our model shows very satisfactory results to explain the negative correlation between those variables based on a method of 2SLS. Estimated labor supply elasticities for married women with respect to their fertility rates, wife's labor earnings, and male labor earnings are -0.67, 0.23, and -1.76 at the sample means, respectively. On the other hand, estimated elasticities of fertility with respect to married women's labor force participation and family income are -0.31 and 0.23, respectively. We find some of these elasticities for Japanese married women very comparable to those of married women in the United States.

The Effects of Japanese Social Security Retirement Benefits on Personal Savings and Elderly Labor Force Behavior

Using Japanese annual time series data covering the period from 1946to 1982, this paper shows that social security wealth depresses personal savings. The effect was a reduction of approximately 143 thousand yen per capita wealth in real terms from 1970 to 1980. However, declining labor force participation of the elderly (i.e., earlier retirement), stimulates personal saving by an estimated 12 thousand yen over the same period. The study found that the benefit effect dominates the retirement effect. In addition, this study has identified a negative interdependency between the personal savings and labor retirement behaviors of the elderly; that is, an individual saves more before retirement if he expects to stay a shorter time in the labor market, and vice versa.

Causal Relationships between Infant Mortality and Fertility in Developedand Less Developed Countries

This paper is a study of the dynamic relationships between two demographic variables--the infant mortality rate and the fertility rate-- using time series methodology. I believe that I have shown that infant mortality and fertility are not independent but rather are jointly determined. Also, i believe that I have shown that a decline in infant mortality that is due to an increase in per capita real income triggers a subsequent decline in fertility.This dynamic nexus between changes in infant mortality and fertilitylies at the heart of the so-called "demographic transition."

The Crime Rate and the Condition of the Labor Market: A Vector Autoregressive Model

Few empirical studies of the economics of crime have doubted the deterrent effects of the legal sanctions on crime. Those studies, however, have not established a definitive understanding of the effects of labor market conditions on crime. In this paper, we examine the impact of labor market conditions, represented by either male civilian unemployment or labor force participation rates, on seven major categories of crime, using the quarterly crime-rate data for the United States. Based on an analysis of the reported crime rates for murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft during the period from the first quarter of 1970 through the fourth quarter of 1983, we reject the null hypothesis that labor market conditions have no effects on the crime rate. Rather, we find that the male civilian unemployment rates, especially the rate for those twenty-five years old and over, are strongly and positively associated with most of the crime rates studied. The male civilian labor force participation rates are also found to be related to the crime rates considered here. Youth labor force participation rates for both whites and non-whites, sixteen to nineteen years old, are more strongly associated with the examined crime rates than are the labor force participation rates for males, twenty years old and over.

Economic Development, Infant Mortality, and Their Dynamics in Latin America

The main issue of this paper is to study infant mortality in Latin America in recent decades. In so doing, two questions must be answered: First, how large is the economic loss in terms of net national product due to child mortality under the age of 15 and what are the major causes of death? Second, has the decline of infant mortality been principally a product of economic development in Latin American countries?Surprisingly enough, there is significant variation of economic losses across Latin American countries, such as from 0.99% of the net national product in Uruguay to 18.93% in Haiti. Eleven among the nineteen countries in Latin America show their economic losses to be more than 3% of the net national product in recent years in marked contrast to those values found by Kuznets (1980) for Egypt (2.68%) and the Netherlands (0.17%) in 1937. As the major causes of death in Latin America, these diseases -- influenzaand pneumonia, enteritis and other diarrheal diseases, and other infective and parasitic diseases -- account for one-third or more of total deaths for many Latin American countries. Being provided with the fact that the proportion of infant mortality only is roughly about 20 - 30%of total deaths across the countries,we speculate that these above diseases will be exclusively responsible for the high mortality in childhood in Latin America.The Cranger-Sims dynamic system shows that economic development in Latin America does not have strong explanatory power in accounting for the behavior of infant mortality rate in recent decades. Therefore, the empirical results seem to support the view that medical and health technological development is the major cause of the reduction in infant mortality rates in Latin American countries in recent decades. However, when economic development Granger-causes infant mortalityas observed for only two countries, the former becomes the main source of variation of the latter over long horizons.

Nutrition and Infant Health in Japan

The model presented in this paper emphasizes the importance of the mother's nutritional intake as a determinant of infant health. Using cross-sectional market averages for 1980 and 1981 in Japan, we find that the nutrient intake of the mother during pregnancy is a potential determinant of neonatal and infant mortality in Japan, with increased consumption of calcium and iron leading to improved birth outcomes. Using the results obtained from the estimation of neonatal and infant mortality production functions, we note that increases in the prices of food items, in particular milk and meat, would lead to increases in neonatal and infant mortality rates. We discover that the availability of abortion in Japan, unlike in the U.S., is positively related to mortality rates, although never significantly. Finally, we see that cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and poor environmental quality all have strongly adverse effects on newborn survival outcomes in Japan.