Project details : 2012

This project intended to analyze quality of life in Russia, from the points of view of labor market, household consumption and gender relations. More specifically, using forms returned from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Surveys, the relationship between micro-level factors such as domestic/social division of labor, consumption patterns, and individual or household–level quality of life from the viewpoints of labor economics, household economics and sociology.

The System of National Accounts 2008 is the newest statistical standard published by the United Nations and some other international organizations. This project addresses the SNA itself and its implementation. Three mini conferences (or workshops) were held over the problem area involved and the recognition is shared by many participants of the SNA and its implementation. 

 We organized a session titled “Employment, Sectoral Change and Economic Development” at Asian Historical Economics Conference (Sano-Shoin, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo) on September 13th in 2012. This session focused on the importance of by-employment in terms of historical occupational change in each country, and the cases of Japan and India were discussed. In March, 2013, We invited two scholars being familiar with historical and contemporary Indian population data and hold a research seminar with the members of our project.

Yasuhiro Omori（The University of Tokyo）, Toshiaki Watanabe（IER）, Ayano Sato（Takasaki City University of Economics）, Kumi Suzuki（Yonezawa Women’s Junior College of Yamagata Prefecture）, Daisuke Nagakura（Keio University）, Masato Ubukata（Kushiro Public University of Economics）, Asuka Takeuchi（Sophia University）

We showed that the realized stochastic volatility and GARCH models, which model realized volatility (RV) and daily returns simultaneously taking account of the bias in RV caused by microstructure noise and non-trading hours perform well in volatility forecasts and option pricing. We also analyzed the skewness and kurtosis of financial returns. We estimated the change in the asymmetry of information and liquidity in the Japanese stock market using the PIN  (Probability of Informed Trading) model.

This research conducts an empirical analysis of the influence of corporate performance and corporate financial condition on wage structure and the volume of employment. For this purpose, panel data based on official microdata from the “Basic Survey of Japanese Business Structure and Activities” and “Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations by Industry” are created. The results of this research show that companies that are more profitable tend to employ more workers, even when controlled for industry and region. Partial results of this research were presented at the workshop ‘Structure of the Japanese Economy Based on Microdata’ which was held at Hitotsubashi University in March 2013, and will be published as a “Discussion Paper” by the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University and in other publications.

In this project, the linkage between stock prices for the Japanese market and the Chinese market was analyzed, as were the impacts of the global financial crisis on the two stock markets. The analysis demonstrated that the Japanese stock market was more affected by the global financial crisis than the Chinese stock market. Compared with the period of the global financial crisis, the fluctuation of stock volatility in China was much more intense in the early 1990s, when the Chinese stock market was just established. On the whole, it has been revealed that the interdependence in stock prices between the Japanese and Chinese markets has increased since the global financial crisis.

In January 2013, we completed the agricultural production survey on 64 rice farming households and 65 maize farming households in Ashante region, Ghana.  We also completed the consistency check of the 2011 census data in 4 villages in Ghana.  By comparing with the results of the 2001 census data, we have obtained 3 major findings: a) The number of maize farmers became significantly smaller: from 936 farmers in 2001 to 794 in 2011, b) In contrast, there was little change in the number of rice farmers: from 176in 2001 to 177 in 2011, c) The number of rice farmers of indigenous ethnic group, Asante, increased.

We have analyzed individuals’ evaluations of the Japanese Public Health Insurance system, mainly addressing its benefits and burdens. As shown in the analysis of our Choice Experiment, a great difference was apparent among respondents. We find that “Insured person in National Health Insurance” and “Respondents whose family members are in bad health,” tend to support the extension of coverage for “All residents.” Furthermore, we investigated the effect of several factors such as socio-economic status, perceived income inequality and perceived regional environment on self-rated health.

This research has been conducted through two stages. It first investigated institutional problems based on existing literature to understand how they may have affected growth. The results of this stage were a journal paper in Strategic Change, 2012.

The second stage of the research worked on re-assessing China’s performance taking into account institutional factor by exploring an index number approach. The results of our preliminary empirical work on the industrial sector have supported our argument. This is good enough for a one-year small, exploratory project, which has laid a foundation for future work.