"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.

Decomposition Analysis of the Household Migration

The purpose of this research is to show the trends and feature of household migration using the microdata in Housing and Land Survey of Japan (at 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008). We screen the effective observation data and examine the variation of the attribute of moving or staying household with regard to age, type of employment, income, housing tenure, residence performance and so on. We characterize the variation in the ratio of household mobility through the decomposition the variation of age distribution (VAD) and the variation of propensity to move (VPM). Drop of the ratio of household mobility is dominated by VAD on the basis advancing aging society. There is the cases that VPM are increasing even if the ratio of household mobility is declining as a whole tendency

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

"Estimation of Fatigue Cost of Commuting Congestion and Optimal Congestion Fare" (in Japanese)

This paper has three aims. First, we estimate a hedonic housing rent function along the Chuo Line in Tokyo with (i) commuting time distance and (ii) congestion degree as explanatory variables. Second, from the hedonic rent function thus estimated, we measure time cost and fatigue cost of commuting in terms of Equivalent Variation. We show that the fatigue cost of commuting is 5-29% of total commuting cost. Third, from the fatigue cost thus estimated, we measure marginal external congestion cost of an additional passenger at the peak rush hour. This marginal external congestion cost is interpreted as optimal congestion toll. The result indicates that the optimal congestion toll for the most congested time is 1-3 times the current commuter-pass fare depending upon the train line segment.

The impact of crime on housing land prices and the effects of police boxes and voluntary groups on crime prevention in Japan

Many people now fear crime in Japan, which has had the image of being a safe country, because the crime rate has increased dramatically and the rate of crime detection has decreased at the same time. As demand for low-crime residential areas becomes stronger, low-crime rates may affect land prices in Japan. High levels of land prices may reflect the high economic value of low-crime neighborhoods. However, the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimate may cause a bias because the crime rate is not necessarily an exogenous determinant of land price. Therefore, in this study, we adopt the instrumental variable (IV) method, and use instrumental variables such as distance from police boxes and existence of voluntary anti-crime groups, and analyze the effects of property crime rates on residential land prices. The results show that a 10% decrease in the rate of burglaries causes an average rise in residential land prices of 1%.Property Crime, Police box, Voluntary crime-prevention group, Instrumental Variable, Propensity Score Matching