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This paper replicates models developed by previous research to study the effects of graduate education on new graduates' initial employment in the Japanese labor market. If education is the best investment for an individual's economic success, then graduate degrees are expected to provide an individual with higher-earning job opportunities. Despite this reasonable economic premise, previous research showed that master's degrees in the humanities or social sciences in Japan have, in fact, a negative impact on obtaining initial employment compared to those with only a bachelor's degree in the humanities or social sciences. This previous research, however, could not overcome omitted variable bias because of data limitations. Omitted variable bias is a key problem for research on education; therefore, this study uses new longitudinal data to overcome omitted variable bias and clearly demonstrate the robustness of these earlier findings. The empirical results of this study corroborate earlier work, showing that master's degrees in the humanities or social sciences do not provide graduate students with an advantage in obtaining initial employment, after controlling for potential bias. At the same time, this study also confirms that natural science majors have a higher probability of obtaining initial employment in comparison with humanities or social science majors. In other words, this paper offers a valid replication of existing research. This shows that the Japanese labor market structure for graduate students has, in essence, remained the same since previous research was completed.

Using data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, this paper compares the earnings premium and employment share of jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) across 11 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The results reveal that the STEM wage premium is higher in the United States than in any of the other comparison countries, despite the fact that the U.S. has a larger share of workers in STEM jobs. We also find evidence that the premium varies significantly across STEM sub-fields and education levels, and that the premium tends to be higher in countries with lower unionization rates, less employment protection, or a larger share of employment in the public sector.

This paper presents one of the first cross-nationally comparative studies on the economic and social returns to grit (perseverance and passion for long-term goals). Specifically, we investigated whether grit incrementally predicted objective (income) and subjective (job satisfaction) career success over and above cognitive skills and educational attainment; whether grit's association with career success was moderated by individual characteristics; whether grit's associations with career success varied across countries; and whether this variation could be explained by labour market conditions (unemployment rates). Multi-group structural equation models with data from 6,738 respondents from 19 countries revealed that grit was incrementally associated with income and job satisfaction in some but not all countries. Grit's effect sizes were mostly modest, yet there were some indications for variations by education and labour market conditions. Overall, these findings suggest that the associations between grit and career success are not uniform but vary across individuals and contexts.

This paper attempts to explore the connections between expanding female education and the participation of women in paid employment in Japan, China and India, three of Asia's largest economies. Analysis based on existing data and literature shows that despite the large expansion in educational access in these countries in the last half century, women have lacked egalitarian labour market opportunities. A combination of social discouragement and individual choice largely explains the withdrawal, non-participation or intermittent female presence in the labour force, notwithstanding increased educational access. In taking stock of these issues and debates across these countries, it is argued that the parallel experiences of women in these countries can be traced back to persistent gender norms which, amongst other things, imply the centrality of marriage and non-market unpaid labour for women. The paper argues that there is a need for gender-sensitive public policy in order for increased education to translate to labour market gains for women, leading to sustainable development outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted labor markets around the world. Workers and corporations scrambled to adjust their workstyles to a new normal, by avoiding the commute and working remotely from their homes or elsewhere. Japan is a country that stood out for its inability to adjust to the remote work imperative. Comparative statistics show that Japan reported the lowest number of people engaged in remote work among the OECD countries, as well as the lowest percentage of corporations that offered remote work policies. In this article, I investigate why telework in Japan is difficult. The lack of telework in Japan may seem paradoxical, given the country's reputation for being technologically advanced. I argue that it is not the technological infrastructure that is lacking in the Japanese workplace, but distinct features of work embedded in Japanese culture and its collectivist roots that prevent the effective implementation of telework. I rely on recently published data from various sources, and apply key sociological theories such as implicit contracts, gift exchange, dramaturgy, and impression management to substantiate my main arguments. The paper concludes by drawing on implications for the future of work in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though Japan and Switzerland are characterised by comparatively low youth unemployment rates, non-standard forms of employment are on the rise, posing a risk to the stable integration of young labour market entrants. Drawing on the French approach of societal analysis, this paper investigates how country-specific school-to-work transition systems stratify the risk of non-standard employment in early career differently in Japan and Switzerland. Our results reveal that in Japan, young entrants who completed university education are least at risk of becoming employed in non-standard work. On the contrary, it is the highly educated university graduates who mainly enter the labour market via non-standard employment in Switzerland, where vocational education promotes smooth transitions into standard employment relationships. Our findings suggest that the transition systems of the two countries differ in the way they revert to non-standard forms of employment. However, while job insecurities may not endanger labour market integration of highly skilled university graduates holding good career prospects in Switzerland, they may go hand in hand with social exclusion processes for the low-educated young entrants lacking bargaining power in the segmented Japanese labour market.

Ample evidence indicates that a person's human capital is important for success on the labor market in terms of both wages and employment prospects. However, unlike the efforts to identify the impact of school attainment on labor-market outcomes, the literature on returns to cognitive skills has not yet provided convincing evidence that the estimated returns can be causally interpreted. Using the PIAAC Survey of Adult Skills, this paper explores several approaches that aim to address potential threats to causal identification of returns to skills, in terms of both higher wages and better employment chances. We address measurement error by exploiting the fact that PIAAC measures skills in several domains. Furthermore, we estimate instrumental-variable models that use skill variation stemming from school attainment and parental education to circumvent reverse causation. Results show a strikingly similar pattern across the diverse set of countries in our sample. In fact, the instrumental-variable estimates are consistently larger than those found in standard least-squares estimations. The same is true in two "natural experiments," one of which exploits variation in skills from changes in compulsory-schooling laws across U.S. states. The other one identifies technologically induced variation in broadband Internet availability that gives rise to variation in ICT skills across German municipalities. Together, the results suggest that least-squares estimates may provide a lower bound of the true returns to skills in the labor market.

This paper examines how Japan has embraced advanced technologies to address the challenges of an aging society and shrinking labor markets. Using Japan as a case study, this paper explores the relationship between human dignity, the intrinsic value of work, and the fourth industrial revolution. The paper is divided into four sections. The first section describes the scale of aging and shrinking labor markets in Japan, and the measures that the Japanese government has used to tackle these problems. The second section offers a selection of five mini cases that show how advanced technologies are used in different sectors of the Japanese economy. The third section outlines some ethical concerns that go beyond utilitarian benefits of using advanced technologies to address the problem of aging. The perspective of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) is adopted as a main advocate of a person-centered social ethics. The fourth section offers an assessment of Japan's experiment and outlines further research opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper attempts to discover whether or not social networks work in the same way in different sectors of the labour market in the same society, using data from the 2008 Asian Social Survey. Labour markets in some societies are segmented; there are two segments in the labour market, namely, the core sector and the peripheral sector. The practices of each sector differs from the others. Some sectors employ CME labour markets, while others favour LME labour markets (Kanbayashi and Takenoshita, 2014). In other words, we can find both CME and LME labour market in one society. Design/methodology/approach: Since Granovetter's (1973) pioneer study, scholars are interested in investigating in what way social network influence our job searching outcomes. However, these researchers have not yet yielded consistent results. Scholars argue that the institutional context of labour market can shape the network impacts on our job search outcome (Chen, 2014; Chua, 2011). Findings: Surprisingly, this paper finds that there is no room for the use of personal contact in the public sector in both China and Japan. But, mean status is positively related to annual income in the private companies sector in both Japan and China. The significant influences of mean status in the private sectors in both China and Japan reflect the reinforcing of existing social inequality structure. This is because as the status of contact can facilitate respondents' job attainment process, those who are already in higher social status are more likely than those who are in the bottom of the social strata, to get a better job with the help from their network members. Originality/value: The above findings show us that social network can exert various impacts on people's job searching process even in the same society. This is because it is possible that the labour market are segmented. These segments have very different practices. This difference attributes to the inconsistent findings of network effects on occupational attainment process. Therefore, it is essential to locate which labour market respondents are in, and the features of this labour market. This can help us know more about the use and effectiveness of network in different types of labour markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediaries are indispensable for processing the mobility of international migrants. In the absence of an official migration policy in Japan, this requirement of intermediaries is not an exception. This paper examines the different approaches of Japanese intermediaries towards Japanese client firms and Vietnamese early-career professionals employed in the information technology sector in the cross-border labour market between Japan and Vietnam. Two major results are derived based on data from semi-structured interviews. First, recruitment companies instruct labour users, and recruitment organizations seek to 'frame' a job post for migrant workers for a successful visa application. Second, temporary staffing firms 'package' multiple Vietnamese workers to provide the necessary labour to clients. This study argues that different types of intermediaries are present in the employment process of early-career foreign skilled labourers and that a temporary staffing firm intervenes the most actively in the employment process of skilled migrants among other intermediaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose. The paper aims at analyzing the approach of the Japanese Government towards the impacts of the fourth industrial revolution. Design/methodology/approach. The paper discusses the application of the Frey and Osborne model to the Japanese labor market as a way to analyze the repercussions of computerization. Furthermore, it provides an overview on the most recent policies devised by the Japanese Government in order to prepare the society for the change, with a specific focus on strategic planning for human resources development. Findings. In the case of Japan, there is a lack of official data that can be used to apply the Frey and Osborne model. The plans of the Japanese Government are ambitious and comprehensive, but do not seem to be based on a full feasibility analysis tailored on the current situation of the Japanese labor market. Research limitations/implications. The research draws its conclusions from previous contributions in order to broaden the dialogue on the fourth industrial revolution outside of the US and EU. Originality/value. The paper adds to the debate on the way in which national governments could deal with the fourth industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Introduction of flexible (or non-regular) work has a negative impact on productivity. • This negative impact is strongest under innovation regimes that rely on highly cumulative knowledge. • Supply-side deregulation of labor markets is likely to have contributed to a productivity growth slowdown in major OECD countries after 2004. Due to labor market reforms around 2003–4, Japan has a growing group of 'non-regular' workers who are easy to fire, and have poor carrier perspectives. This marks a break with the traditional Japanese model of life-time employment that allowed for intensive in-company training and commitment of personnel. Drawing from a national wage structure survey, we find indications that employment of non-regular workers has a negative impact on productivity (proxied by wages), this negative impact being largest under innovation regimes that require a high cumulativeness of knowledge. Our findings are consistent with neo-Schumpeterian research in Europe which concluded that certain labor market rigidities, while being un desirable from a neoclassical perspective, can be useful to innovation. Our paper confirms the impression from earlier research that structural reforms of labor markets along supply-side lines are likely to be one of the reasons for a substantial decline of productivity growth in major OECD countries since about 2004/05. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's so-called Lost Decade of the 1990s presents a unique case study of an economy with a recent severe and prolonged recession, with large changes in the labor market and fiscal policy as the main policy available to the government. Japanese unemployment rate surged from 2.1% in 1991 to 5.4% in 2002. Meanwhile, the Japanese economy experienced a rise in government expenditures, while taxes remained fairly stable. This paper quantitatively evaluates the impact of these changes in fiscal policies on labor market variables, in particular the unemployment rate, during the 1990s. We build, calibrate, and simulate a dynamic general equilibrium model with search frictions in the labor market, a productive government sector, heterogenous government spendings, and different categories of taxes. Our model is able to reproduce the paths of the main labor market variables, and the counterfactual experiments show that the changes that took place in the different spending components affected the unemployment rate heterogeneously, although overall they kept unemployment lower than it could have been. We also find that had the government also implemented countercyclical tax policies, unemployment would not have risen as much as it did by 2002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on the economic implications of the free trade agreement (FTA) between Korea and Japan. Topics discussed include the benefit of the FTA to Japan due to its capital-intensive production technology, its impact on labor market, unemployment rate and consumer income, and the surplus to be received by Korea from trade liberalization.

The introduction of 'gig work' has been accompanied by an official discourse which highlights the benefits for 'gig workers', especially as arises from the more autonomous nature of this particular type of employment. In contrast, this paper draws upon the cultural political economy approach to argue that the move towards gig work is more accurately conceptualised as an attempt to legitimate the further flexibilisation of labour markets within advanced industrial democracies, seeking to construct economic imaginaries that are best described as a form of 'fictitious freedom'. In drawing on the cultural political economy approach, the paper explores the interaction between the structural, discursive and technological selectivities which have generated these outcomes. This is done through a discussion of the case of Japan, which is selected as a key case that highlights the tensions and pressures leading to the introduction of gig work in this way across the advanced industrial democracies. The article shows how gig work sees new digital technologies used in an attempt to increase productivity and thereby further growth, locking gig workers into low-skilled and low-paid super-fragmented tasks, whilst at the same time heralding the benefits that gig work can provide for a range of contemporary problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the 'new trinity' reform of labour markets proposed in 2023, which is an integral part of Japan's New Form of Capitalism. After providing an overview of the reform's three components – reskilling/upskilling, inter-company mobility, and job-based employment – it discusses how the reform may contribute to reduction of labour shortages, skill shortages, and inequality among workers. It then assesses challenges to this reform, ways to overcome these challenges, and how Japan may hold answers for other countries facing similar labour market problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrialized countries have increasingly used skill-based selective migration policies to reduce labor and skill shortages. But are these policies effective? This paper uses Japan and the United Kingdom to illustrate how immigration policy and employment, training and labor practices influence labor and skill supply. Until recently, these two countries had different migration policies and labor practices. Yet data shows similar patterns of labor and skill shortage profiles in both countries. This paper draws on empirical research to argue that such outcomes suggest that immigration policies will not alleviate labor and skill shortages unless accompanied by the transformation of employment and training practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structural transformation started in Japan during the last decades of the past century and the institutional adjustments that followed have significantly reshaped personal and functional income distribution patterns. In this paper we investigate the long-term drivers of the share of output accruing to labor in Japan. Our contribution lies in extending the theoretical SK schedule model by Bentotila and Saint-Paul to multiple inputs and in providing new empirical evidence on Japan over the period 1970-2012. Results indicate that low-knowledge-intensive market services were mainly responsible for the decline in the labor share in Japan over the four decades considered. This was related to technological change and, more importantly, to labor and product market structural and institutional features. These drivers could have significantly contributed to reducing the bargaining power of labor vis-à-vis employers and, consequently, the labor share. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper replicates models developed by previous research to study the effects of graduate education on new graduates’ initial employment in the Japanese labor market. If education is the best investment for an individual’s economic success, then graduate degrees are expected to provide an individual with higher-earning job opportunities. Despite this reasonable economic premise, previous research showed that master’s degrees in the humanities or social sciences in Japan have, in fact, a negative impact on obtaining initial employment compared to those with only a bachelor’s degree in the humanities or social sciences. This previous research, however, could not overcome omitted variable bias because of data limitations. Omitted variable bias is a key problem for research on education; therefore, this study uses new longitudinal data to overcome omitted variable bias and clearly demonstrate the robustness of these earlier findings. The empirical results of this study corroborate earlier work, showing that master’s degrees in the humanities or social sciences do not provide graduate students with an advantage in obtaining initial employment, after controlling for potential bias. At the same time, this study also confirms that natural science majors have a higher probability of obtaining initial employment in comparison with humanities or social science majors. In other words, this paper offers a valid replication of existing research. This shows that the Japanese labor market structure for graduate students has, in essence, remained the same since previous research was completed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low inflation was once welcomed by both policymakers and the public. However, Japan's experience during the 1990s changed the consensus of economists and central banks around the world regarding prices. Facing deflation and the zero-interest bound at the same time, the Bank of Japan had difficulty conducting an effective monetary policy, making Japan's stagnation unusually prolonged. The too-low inflation that concerns central banks today translates into the "Phillips curve puzzle." In the United States and Japan, in the course of the recovery from the Great Recession after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the unemployment rate had steadily declined to a level commonly regarded as lower than the natural rate or NAIRU. However, inflation remained low. In this paper, we consider a minimal model of the dual labor market to jointly investigate how the different factors affecting the structural evolution of the labor market have contributed to the observed flattening of the Phillips curve. We find that the level of bargaining power of workers, elasticity of the supply of labor to wage in the secondary market, and composition of the workforce are the main factors jointly explaining the evidence for Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's labor market has been under severe strain over the past few decades, driven by its protracted economic recession, a series of labor market reforms, and changing labor management practices. Confronting these new challenges, an increasing number of young people have had extreme difficulties in searching for decent and stable jobs in the labor market, trapped in the vicious cycle of precarious employment. This paper examines the deterioration of employment and labor market conditions for Japan's youth after the collapse of the asset bubble in the early 1990s and the government's policy efforts to address these concerns, especially since the early 2000s, a period during which it has initiated a wide array of youth employment and labor market policies. In particular, it analyzes variations in policy target group and goal across different measures and evaluates the effectiveness and limitations of these programs in dealing with youth problems in the labor market. This paper argues that while the government has promoted various policy tools to help young people become economically and socially independent individuals, it has gradually shifted its policy focus toward human capital development for growth and industrial competitiveness as a way of revitalizing Japan's troubling economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unconventional monetary policy (UMP) influences inequality through two channels that work in opposite directions – a labour market channel (more employment, higher wages) and a financial market channel (higher asset prices). In an earlier paper, covering UMP through 2014, we found that UMP in Japan had contributed to greater income inequality through its effects on asset prices. With a longer time period, a richer dataset including labour market data, and a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) we confirm that these results continue to hold, and investigate why UMP's impact on inequality in Japan differs from some other countries. We argue that Japanese structural issues may mute the labour market channel, especially: (i) labour market rigidity; and (ii) the large share of the population that is older than 65 years old or retired. The older cohort's capital gains and dividends are re-saved in other financial assets, instead of being consumed or used for starting businesses. At the same time, wages have not increased despite the severe labour shortage, due to the frictions in Japan's labour market. We conclude that these factors may make the inequality created by UMP in Japan unique by international comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a response to demographic ageing, various governments have been promoting social policies that promote older people's participation in productive activities, including those outside the formal labour market. Nevertheless, older people's behaviours do not simply reflect government policies and intentions. This paper explores how older people themselves interpret their social roles within a policy context that seeks to position them as providers of welfare through their participation in community activities. For this purpose, this paper draws on a qualitative case study of older people in Japan engaging in health promotion and mutual aid among local residents. By employing Hannah Arendt's distinction between the human activities of labour, work and action as a conceptual framework, it finds that although the purported purpose of community activities was to substitute decreasing pensions and family care or to create a better community, participants in this study valued their activities as a process of creating new relations and new realities through action. The paper argues that while labour has occupied a predominant position in the post-war welfare paradigm, community activities by an expanding population of older people may offer opportunities for action, which were not always available through paid work or care-giving in the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates Japanese labor market mismatch between 2000 and 2019 by using the method of Sahin et al. ("Mismatch Unemployment." The American Economic Review 104 (11): 3529–64, 2014). We quantify contract-type (regular or non-regular), employment-type (full or part-time), and occupational mismatch and their respective contributions to changes in unemployment. All three types of mismatch show a countercyclical pattern, sharply increasing during the global financial crisis (GFC), but slowly declining during the recovery. Contract-type and occupational mismatch accounted for a significant portion of the rise in the unemployment rate during the GFC, each accounting for around 30 and 20–40 percent, respectively. Employment-type mismatch, on the other hand, accounted for much less–at around 15 perecent of the rise in unemployment for the same period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the writing on labor market flexibilization focuses on non-regular employment, this ethnography of precarious work explores one overlooked aspect, the experiences of increasingly precarious young regular workers. These jobs take the form of standard employment, but workers are often subjected to even more precarious and exploitative working conditions than non-regular workers. Drawing on the case of Japan, a seemingly unlikely place to observe such a development, this article has three aims. First, it clarifies the underlying mechanisms of labor exploitation in precarious regular employment. Second, it illustrates these mechanisms at work by examining the experiences of young workers. Third, it explores the potential of such young workers to disrupt these mechanisms through an individualistic form of collective action. The paper illuminates that, in the context of labor market flexibilization, inequality of security exists not only between standard and non-standard employment but also within standard employment arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1905, Karafuto (Southern Sakhalin) became Japan’s second formal colony and the most sparsely populated territory in the Japanese empire. Despite its peripheral location and small population the colony was of important economic value, boasting considerable natural resources such as marine products, coal, oil and timber. This combination of richness and remoteness meant that enterprises in the colony faced an acute labour shortage. This paper examines the ways that enterprises operating in Karafuto sought to circumvent this problem by analysing the recruitment, management and maintenance of labour in Karafuto’s forestry and construction industries. It is found that a degree of coercion emerged at worksites in the colony, as management struggled to hold onto its workforce for the entirety of a project; however, coercion was not the norm and was strongly associated with specific recruitment grounds. Utilizing contemporary social research, colonial newspaper reports, oral testimony and other sources this paper finds that recruits from further afield were more likely to be involved in incidents of abuse than those in close proximity to Karafuto. Local connections, strength in numbers and mutual dependence of workers from these areas and Karafuto-based recruiters for work/labour served to reduce levels of conflict between the two parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to explore the connections between expanding female education and the participation of women in paid employment in Japan, China and India, three of Asia's largest economies. Analysis based on existing data and literature shows that despite the large expansion in educational access in these countries in the last half century, women have lacked egalitarian labour market opportunities. A combination of social discouragement and individual choice largely explains the withdrawal, non-participation or intermittent female presence in the labour force, notwithstanding increased educational access. In taking stock of these issues and debates across these countries, it is argued that the parallel experiences of women in these countries can be traced back to persistent gender norms which, amongst other things, imply the centrality of marriage and non-market unpaid labour for women. The paper argues that there is a need for gender-sensitive public policy in order for increased education to translate to labour market gains for women, leading to sustainable development outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ethnic entrepreneurship can be an alternative economic strategy among immigrants whose labor market opportunities in the host society are hindered by language deficiency, institutional constraints or racial discrimination. However, it can also constrain migrants' social economic mobility. This is especially likely when, with particular visa policies, ethnic business is appropriated as a channel for labor migration, trapping migrants in a narrow economic niche. Excessive concentration in one type of business leads to low road competition within the community and co-ethnic exploitation. This study uses the case of Nepalese immigrants' restaurant businesses in Japan to illustrate this pitfall of ethnic entrepreneurship. It highlights the roles of the immigration regime and the migration industry in creating such a condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have investigated the impact of imports, especially those from China, on the domestic labor market. In this paper, we empirically examine the effects of not only imports from China but also those from regional trade agreement (RTA) partners on employment in Japan. To this end, we decomposed the total import penetration into the import penetration under the most favored nation (MFN) and RTA regimes. To address the endogeneity concern on our import penetration variables, we estimated our models by the instrumental variable method. As in previous studies in the literature, we found that the rise in import penetration from China significantly decreases employment in Japan. In contrast, import penetration under the RTA regime is found to have significantly positive effects on employment. The increase in imports under RTA regimes is not harmful to the domestic labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a large micro dataset from Japan, this paper provides evidence on the relationship between postgraduate education and labor-market outcomes. According to the analysis, the key findings include: (1) The employment-to-population rates of females and elderly people with postgraduate educations are higher than those with undergraduate educations. (2) The postgraduate wage premium relative to undergraduates is approximately 30-40 percent, which is similar in magnitude for male and female workers. (3) The wage reduction after age 60 is less for workers with a postgraduate education. (4) The private rate of return to postgraduate education exceeds 10 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of publicly-funded social care programs in Japan and Korea, known as the "familistic'' welfare state, over the past two decades. Despite the rapid expansion of social care programs funded by taxes and social insurance premiums, the delivery of social care services in the two countries has been mostly delegated to the private sector (including both non-profit and forprofit organizations), as opposed to the public sector. This paper argues that Japan and Korea have utilized the mixture of publiclyfunded social care and privately-dominated care service delivery as a social investment strategy in order to alleviate the burden of care responsibilities on female family members and create more employment opportunities in the care service sector. By making the policy linkage between social care programs and labor market policies, the two countries have attempted to solve multiple policy problems, while facing the pressure of socio-demographic challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspirations for the future can influence investments made today, and gender gaps in aspirations can perpetuate gender gaps in outcomes. In this paper, we explore how the local labor market affects gender gaps in aspirations. Using a national longitudinal survey from Japan, we begin by documenting large gender differences in adolescents' aspirations with respect to education, marriage, and fertility, as well as parental aspirations for their child's education. We then show that these gender gaps – specifically, boys aiming for higher educational attainment as well as later marriage and fertility – are significantly smaller in municipalities with higher female employment. Consistent with this, we also find that female employment is associated with higher parental investments in girls relative to boys. We detect similar patterns when examining realized outcomes at age 19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how parental caregiving affects women's employment in Japan. Drawing on the 2005–2014 Longitudinal Survey of Middle-Aged and Elderly Persons, we estimate logistic regression models for the employment status of middle-aged women in various types of employment as a function of caregiving intensity to examine when and in what context caregivers' employment may be at risk for Japanese women. The results showed that working women who began providing 5 or more hours of care per week were significantly more likely to leave their jobs than non-caregiving women; those who began providing fewer than 5 hours of care per week did not show this likelihood. Among women in regular employment, those who began to provide 5 or more hours of care per week and those who provided care in the previous year were more likely to stop working or change jobs than their non-caregiving counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Taiwan Journal of Sociology of Education is the property of Taiwan Association for the Sociology of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

BACKGROUND Research has examined how the gendered household division of labor may deter the transition to second birth. However, little research has investigated how workplace norms influence men's household work. OBJECTIVE This paper takes into account labor market structure, workplace norms, and the legal environment governing working conditions to contextualize men's contribution to household labor and its effect on transition to second birth. METHODS Using data from the Japanese Longitudinal Survey of Adults in the 21st Century (2002 Cohort), we employ fixed-effects models to estimate the effect of workplace norms on men's contribution to household work and the effect of men's household work hours on transition to second birth. RESULTS Japanese male university graduates in large firms do a smaller share of household labor than other men. These men are subject to workplace norms prevalent in firm-internal labor markets, which have been supported by Japanese Supreme Court rulings. These norms influence men's allocation of time between the workplace and the home. Moreover, analysis of the transition to second birth indicates that husband's share of household work is an important predictor of second birth, especially for dual-earner couples. CONCLUSIONS Our empirical results suggest that unless changes are made in Japanese employment law and workplace norms, dual-earner couples in particular will continue to face difficulties proceeding to a second birth. CONTRIBUTION This paper demonstrates how the economic and cultural context can create disincentives for men to contribute to household labor, which in turn lowers the probability of transition to second birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a tractable multi-sector endogenous growth model with labor market friction and human capital accumulation to analyze the underlying link between economic growth and labor market institutions. The model, calibrated based on the Japanese structural transformation episodes, demonstrates that lifetime employment system has contributed to unprecedentedly rapid economic growth, by enhancing human capital accumulation and facilitating physical capital formation. The counterfactual experiment finds that had the job durations of a typical worker been 1 year (roughly one tenth of the actual average job duration) for 1960-1990 in the Japanese labor market, the non-agricultural GDP per capita in 1990 would have accounted for 71 percent of the actual values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether region-specific shocks alter regional labor market tightness and matching efficiencies. We adopt the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011, which caused a tsunami and nuclear disaster, as a region-specific shock. We find that an increase in labor market tightness, namely, labor shortage, occurs in the damaged regions after the disaster. Matching efficiencies in the damaged regions deteriorate, suggesting that the composition of unemployment and vacancies changes, leading to higher search frictions. Such nature has spatial spillover effects because of the widespread increase in demand for reconstruction and out-migration from the damaged regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the dependence of unemployment on real oil price and real interest rate is an important issue that has been addressed only in the time dimension, little is known about the movements of real input prices and their impact on unemployment in the time-frequency space. With a continuous wavelet coherency and partial coherency approach and monthly data of Japan and US from January 1960 to May 2017, this paper contributes to the literature by examining the characteristics of the dependence of unemployment on real input prices across frequencies and over time. The empirical results indicate that: First, a rise in real oil price leads to productivity growth slowdown and unemployment increase at the scale of 16–64 months after 1990 for Japan and 8–24 months after 2005 for US. Second, an increase in real interest rate results in higher unemployment at the 16–32-month scale before 1974 for Japan and 8–64-month scale before 2000 for US. Third, the degree of integration between labour market and energy market in US is higher than that in Japan. This study provides time-frequency evidence to the supply side hypothesis about the relationships between input prices and unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The author comments on the article "The Impact of Globalization on Establishment-Level Employment Dynamics in Japan," by Naomi Kodama and Tomohiko Inui, published within the issue. Topics discussed include a review of related literature, support to the authors' view that current literature should be supplemented by a holistic data review, and the finding that single-establishment/non-subsidiary firms incurred a huge net loss in employment.

We study the welfare implications of a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA). The model is based on the recent trade literature that considers search and matching frictions in the labor market. We extend the model by incorporating country-level heterogeneity in terms of production technology, population, and productivity endowment. By calibrating the model to Japanese and Korean data in order to assess the expected outcome of the potential Korea-Japan FTA, we find that when the two countries have the same population size, Japan receives greater benefits from the FTA because its relatively more capital-intensive production allows for quicker output adjustment upon trade liberalization. When we take into account that Japan's population is 2.5 times that of Korea, however, the results show that Korea enjoys a greater surplus because of the market size effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study empirically examined unemployment dynamics in 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, namely, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand. It used quarterly data on the unemployment rates from the first quarter of 1980 to the first quarter of 2013. This paper employed three different econometric methods, including the recently-developed powerful unit root test with structural break (Lee and Strazicich, 2003, 2004) and the nonlinear unit root test (Enders and Lee, 2012). The findings indicated that the unemployment rates in five countries of the region, namely, China, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand, had highly dynamic labor markets in which higher-than-normal unemployment rates would revert to the normal level. The other seven Asia-Pacific countries had less dynamic labor markets. The findings of this study have some important policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]