Many developed countries face a growing need for long-term care provision because of population ageing. Japan is one such example, given its population's longevity and low birth rate. In this study, we examine the efficiency of Japan's regional long-term care system in FY2010 by performing a data envelopment analysis, a non-parametric frontier approach, on prefectural data and separating cost e...

Building on three widely accepted premises (productivity gains from the division of labor, efficiency gains derived from the proximity of suppliers and users of certain inputs, the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market) this paper shows that a small, open economy may be caught in an underdevelopment trap in which a shallow division of labor (i.e., a low variety of specialized...

The phenomenon of the shortage of rural workers is a response of labor market to rapid export growth and economic growth after China became a WTO member. It not only indicates a transition of China’s rural surplus labor forces from unlimited supply to limited surplus, but also highlights the urgent need for an integrated national labor market to solve the structural issue of segregated local la...

Within an incomplete contracts theoretic framework, we examine the consequences of contract renegotiation for contract design/enforcement and training market efficiency. Specifically, we show how the imposition of either firing costs or exit costs can bind together employers and employees in longer-lasting employment relationships that allow both agents to amortise their training investment. Ne...

Three dimensions of the performance of firms in Ghana’s manufacturing sector are investigated in this paper: their technology and the importance of technical and allocative efficiency. We show that the diversity of factor choices in not due to a non-homothetic technology. Observable skills are not quantitatively important as determinants of productivity. Technical inefficiency is not lower in f...

Societies are characterized by customs governing the allocation of non-market goods such as marital partnerships. We explore how such customs affect the educational investment decisions of young singles and the subsequent joint labor supply decisions of partnered couples. We consider two separate matching paradigms for agents with heterogeneous abilities one where partners marry for money and t...

A customary gender division of labor is one in which women and men are directed towards certain tasks and/or explicitly prohibited from performing others. We offer an explanation as to why the gender division of labor is so often enforced by custom, and why customary gender divisions of labor generally involve both direction and prohibition. Our model builds on the literature on the marital hol...

Analyzing a homogenous household setting with endogenous fertility and endogenous labor supply, we demonstrate that moving from joint taxation to individual taxation and adapting child benefits so as to keep fertility constant entails a Pareto improvement. The change is associated with an increase in labor supply and consumption and a reduction of the marginal income tax, while the child benefi...

Three dimensions of the performance of firms in Ghana’s manufacturing sector are investigated in this paper: their technology and the importance of technical and allocative efficiency. We show that the diversity of factor choices is not due to a non-homothetic technology. Observable skills are not quantitatively important as determinants of productivity. Technical inefficiency is not lower in f...