Digital Commons Network^™

A Framework For Thinking About The Future Of Japanese Society In The Face Of Declining Fertility And Population, Hirotaka Nagaishi

Japanese Society and Culture

Japanese society is facing declining birthrates and a shrinking population. According to Yoshinori Hiroi, what is indispensable for promoting regional and urban revitalization and seeking sustainability in this situation is the selection of values and concepts for a desirable society rooted in community. This society will ultimately be realized through policy integration/comprehensive policies.

Therefore, we must envisage a desirable future society, taking the current social situation as the starting point. Robert and Edward Skidelsky see the current capitalist society as a “rich enough, poor enough society,” while Hiroi sees the future society as a “post-capitalist/post-industrial society” and considers it as …

The History Of Water Utility Management In Japan And The Recent Introduction Of Public-Private Partnerships: An Analysis Based On The Transaction Cost Concept, Akira Hachisu

Japanese Society and Culture

Japan’s water utility management is facing severe business challenges. During these circumstances, laws and systems are being developed to restructure the waterworks industry. Water utilities, as local public corporations, need to simultaneously pursue public interest and efficiency through public-private partnerships with private operators (public-private partnerships) and wide-area partnerships with neighboring operators.

The management foundations of Japan's water utilities have weakened, because they focus only on the effectiveness of accounting cost reductions. Specifically, the emphasis has been on the effect of reducing public sector finances, such as value for money. Outsourcing has been considered only by comparing accounting costs, such as …

Does The Budget Of A Movie Have An Impact On Income?, Luciana Mendoza, Fiorella Mendez, Samuel Schreyer

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

Numerous sources in the field have discussed the positive correlation between movie budgets and the box office income of movies. This research paper aims to examine further the effects budget has on the income success of movies. To achieve this objective, we have extracted data on the most popular movies globally from the International Movie Database (IMDb). The data utilizes information between the years 2019 to 2022. The dependent variable, INCOME, is controlling for various independent variables, which are BUDGET (in millions of dollars), RATING (on a scale of 1-10), and RUNTIME (in minutes). Furthermore, our categorical variables are MONTH …

The Legal Order In East Asian Family Law, Sai Sasaki

Japanese Society and Culture

No abstract provided.

Coal In Modern Japanese History, Tomoki Shimanishi

Japanese Society and Culture

This study investigates the relationship between coal and the modern Japanese economy from a historical perspective. Because Japan has utilized coal since the dawn of industrialization, we focus on various aspects, such as a primary energy source, a trade good, and a substance of environmental burden.

(1) Coal was not only an export good but also the most important primary energy source for Japan’s industrialization. However, coal imports grew after WWI. After all, the amount of imported coal surpassed domestic coal production in the late 1960s. (2) In the end of the 19th century, major coal mines abandoned the butty …

Broadly Shared Local Economic Success Since 2000: New Measures And New Lessons For Communities, Timothy J. Bartik, Brad J. Hershbein, Kathleen Bolter, Kyle Huisman

Reports

In recent decades, many local labor markets—especially those in former industrial areas—have experienced lagging employment rates, hourly wages, and annual earnings. Even in places that have thrived, disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups and those with less education have often fared poorly, and long-term growth has bypassed many Americans at the middle and bottom of the income distribution. This report examines the relative economic success over the past two decades (prior to the COVID pandemic) of different local labor markets throughout the United States, both for residents overall and for those of different demographic groups. We construct a new, publicly available …

Cross-Cousin Marriage Among Tsimane Forager–Horticulturalists During Demographic Transition And Market Integration, Arianna Dalzero, Bret A. Beheim, Hillard Kaplan, Jonathan Stieglitz, Paul L. Hooper, Cody T. Ross, Michael D. Gurven, Dieter Lukas

ESI Publications

Although still prevalent in many human societies, the practice of cousin marriage has precipitously declined in populations undergoing rapid demographic and socioeconomic change. However, it is still unclear whether changes in the structure of the marriage pool or changes in the fitness-relevant consequences of cousin marriage more strongly influence the frequency of cousin marriage. Here, we use genealogical data collected by the Tsimane Health and Life History Project to show that there is a small but measurable decline in the frequency of first cross-cousin marriage since the mid-twentieth century. Such changes are linked to concomitant changes in the pool of …

[Discussions] Vol. 19 Iss. 1

Discussions

This issue of Discussions was published for the Spring 2023 cycle.

An Investigation Of The Validity Of A Framework Constructed To Predict And Facilitate Upward-Stability, Timothy Streett

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Capstones

This study is an investigation of the validity of the theoretical assumptions of a programming model which posits that it is not income but rather a collection of personality and dispositional constructs which provide the foundation of an economically stable life, and that empowering those in poverty to improve their economic situation must begin with these constructs or will be a failed effort. The author provides a review of significant literature supporting the idea that these constructs are associated with better outcomes in many aspects of life. The author then provides original investigative research utilizing a self-administered, 40 item agree/disagree …

An Economic Advocacy Approach To Empower Rural Victims Of Gender-Based Violence: A Review Of The Literature, Loganne Ditter, Ziwei Qi

Academic Leadership Journal in Student Research

Gender-based violence (GBV) has devastating effects on survivors’ mental, emotional, psychological, physical, and financial well-being. In rural communities, cultural stigma, isolation, lack of services, economic deprivation, and poverty can create additional barriers for survivors to seek help and leave their abusive relationships. Economic advocacy is a survivor-centered approach that addresses poverty and economic insecurity in ending GBV and empowers individuals and communities with the necessary resources and skills. In this review article, the researchers aim to identify survivors’ unique challenges in rural communities, especially in economic hardship and financially dire situations. While the empirical research examined in this review has …

Twenty Years Of The Application Of Rooney Rule And Diversity Practices In The Nfl Workplace, David M. Savino

Journal of the North American Management Society

While the inception of the Rooney Rule has been generally applauded in its intention, the results achieved have been less than noteworthy. In the 20 years since its inception and application in team searches for head coaches of the National Football League, the outcome may be a true sign of the difficulty associated with creating fair and equitable job opportunities in any workplace. Also, there has been a long-standing and deeply entrenched system that has been in place, especially in the sports world, to ensure little change in the overall system. This has not only been true for the sports …

Working Remotely And Corporate Culture Wars In The Post-Pandemic Era, David M. Savino, Danielle C. Foster

Journal of the North American Management Society

Organizational culture is a sacred element of any organization. It is the lifeblood and the guiding force that makes each organization unique in its ability to navigate day-to-day and longer-term perspectives of corporate operations. Strong cultures help identify direction and philosophy and provide confidence in how to proceed to pursue innovative ideas and solve problems. Since 2020, the core value and the strength of many organizational cultures have been tested as a result of the increased reliance on working remotely and the adoption of a hybrid model of business operations not previously utilized to a great degree. While many survived …

The Long-Run Impacts Of Public Industrial Investment On Local Development And Economic Mobility: Evidence From World War Ii, Andrew Garin, Jonathan Rothbaum

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper studies the long-run effects of government-led construction of manufacturing plants on the regions where they were built and on individuals from those regions. Specifically, we examine publicly financed plants built in dispersed locations outside of major urban centers for security reasons during the United States’ industrial mobilization for World War II. Wartime plant construction had large and persistent impacts on local development, characterized by an expansion of relatively high-wage manufacturing employment throughout the postwar era. These benefits were shared by incumbent residents; we find men born before WWII in counties where plants were built earned $1,200 (in 2020 …

Good Times, Politics, And Collapse: The Archaeology Of Old St. Joseph, Florida, Christopher N. Hunt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The town of St. Joseph, established in 1835, served as a deep-water port for receiving and shipping dry goods up the Apalachicola River north along the vast network of navigable inland waterways in the southeastern U.S. during the early nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this town was hit with a yellow fever epidemic, a fire, and a series of hurricanes that, combined with the infancy of its cotton trade activities, eventually devastated its economy and population. The town disappeared by 1842, only much later to be replaced by modern Port St. Joe (est. 1909), located north of the original settlement. However, St. …

Employer Market Power In Silicon Valley, Matthew Gibson

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Adam Smith alleged that employers often secretly combine to reduce labor earnings. This paper examines an important case of such behavior: illegal no-poaching agreements through which information-technology companies agreed not to compete for each other’s workers. Exploiting the plausibly exogenous timing of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, I estimate the effects of these agreements using a difference-in-difference design. Data from Glassdoor permit the inclusion of rich employer- and job-level controls. On average the no-poaching agreements reduced salaries at colluding firms by 5.6 percent, consistent with considerable employer market power. Stock bonuses and job satisfaction were also negatively affected.

Work Organization And High-Paying Jobs, Dylan Nelson, Nathan Wilmers, Letian Zhang

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

High-paying factory jobs in the 1940s were an engine of egalitarian economic growth for a generation. Are there alternate forms of work organization that deliver similar benefits for frontline workers? Work organization varies by type of complexity and degree of employer control. Technical and tacit knowledge tasks receive higher pay for signaling or developing human capital. Higher-autonomy tasks elicit efficiency wages. To test these ideas, we match administrative earnings to task descriptions from job postings. We then compare earnings for workers hired into the same occupation and firm, but under different task allocations. When jobs raise task complexity and autonomy, …

Employment Effects Of Minimum Wage Changes Across Regions, Age Groups, And Sectors, Aleksandra Majchrowska, Pawel Strawinski

Journal of Banking and Financial Economics

Increases in minimum wages in many developed and developing economies in recent years raise the question of whether and how they impact employment. We analyze the employment effects of minimum wage increases for different age groups of workers simultaneously. We construct a panel using three-dimensional cells formed by three age groups, two economic sectors, and 16 regions, separately for each year. We use individual data on employee and employer characteristics from the Structure of Earnings Survey and aggregated data from the Local Data Bank in Poland. The research period covers 2006–2020. Our results confi rm the differences in employment elasticity …

Health Care Costs Among Patients With Hematologic Malignancies Receiving Allogeneic Transplants: A Us Payer Perspective, Richard Maziarz, Usama Gergis, Marie Louise Edwards, Yan Song, Qing Liu, Annika Anderson, James Signorovitch, Rocio Manghani, Ronit Simantov, Heayoung Shin, Smitha Sivaraman

Department of Medical Oncology Faculty Papers

Patients with hematologic malignancies undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplant (allo-HCT) require extensive care. Using the Merative MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters database (2016 Q1-2020 Q2), we quantified the costs of care and assessed real-world complication rates among commercially insured US patients diagnosed with a hematologic malignancy and aged between 12 and 64 years undergoing inpatient allo-HCT. Health care resource use and costs were assessed from 100 days before HCT to 100 days after HCT. Primary hospitalization was defined as the time from HCT until first discharge date. Incidence of complications was assessed using medical billing codes from HCT date to …

Policies For Place: How To Make Sustainable Investments In Communities, Kathleen Bolter, Timothy J. Bartik, Brad J. Hershbein, Michelle Miller-Adams, Lee Adams, Brian J. Asquith, Alfonso Hernandez, Kyle Huisman, Iryna V. Lendel, Gabrielle Pepin, Bridget Timmeney, Beth C. Truesdale, Yulya Truskinovsky

Reports

No abstract provided.

Financial Literacy, Health Insurance, And Health-Related Financial Behaviors, Kyle Kopplin

Numeracy

Research on financial literacy seeks to determine whether costly financial mistakes can be avoided. Decisions all consumers face are whether to purchase health insurance, purchase prescriptions, pursue recommended medical testing, and seek medical help for related problems by comparing perceived costs and benefits. Using data from the National Financial Capability Study, this paper provides evidence that financial literacy is a significant determinant in health insurance demand that also reduces the probability of less desirable health-related financial behaviors.

Southern Nevada Regional Industrial Study, Brookings Mountain West, Center For Business And Economic Research, Transportation Research Center

Policy Briefs and Reports

Recognizing the ongoing need to diversify the Southern Nevada economy, in 2023 GOED commissioned Brookings Mountain West, the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research, and the UNLV Transportation Research Center to evaluate how Southern Nevada can leverage its geography and connectivity to neighboring states and metros at the megapolitan level to pursue industrial opportunities in the face of shifting global supply chains, diminishing developable land, the need for efficient management of the regional water supply, and the availability of unprecedented federal resources to support clean energy development, manufacturing, electrification of transportation systems, and supply-chain resiliency.

The study builds on …

Who Do You Think Is The Greatest-Ever Economist?, Mark Skousen

Business Faculty Articles and Research

"Deciding who is the Greatest of All Time (GOAT) is a popular debate in sports. Is it Michael Jordan in basketball? Lionel Messi in fútbol? Muhammed Ali in boxing? Babe Ruth in baseball? (In case you are wondering, the answer is 'yes' in each category.)

Tyler Cowen, professor at George Mason University and co-publisher of the popular Marginal Revolution website, has come up with one of the most clever, entertaining ways to write a history of economic thought by selecting his favorite GOAT in economics."

Success Factors And Pain Points In Economic And Social Development Of South Asia, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Talks, Speeches, & Discourse

It's always a great pleasure to be addressing the SAARC audiences because I've been doing that for so many years in the past. .Let me begin by congratulating the State Bank of Pakistan for organizing this particular discussion because we're moving in a completely different direction and we have to prepare ourselves and learn from the other countries and other best practices in order to adopt and use Big data, Data analytics , the AI, machine learning tools in order to improve our economies. So I'm quite happy that this topic has been taken up today but let me submit …

Gender And Age Wage–Productivity Gaps In Intangible And Non-Intangible Work Occupations, Tanja Istenič, Tjaša Redek, Daša Farčnik

Economic and Business Review

The paper focuses on gender- and age-related wage–productivity gaps in intangible and non-intangible work occupations using the 2017 Slovenian linked employer–employee microdata for privately owned firms. Comparing employees based on age, gender and occupation, our results show that, in general, there are wage gaps in favour of men, with the exception of individuals aged 50 or older who belong to the intangible capital group, where the wages of men and women are almost equal. There are also significant wage gaps in favour of older workers, with the exception of women in non-intangible occupations, where those aged 30–49 and those aged …

Ambiguity, Cognitive Reflection, And Strategic Complexity Across Auctions, Cary Deck, Paan Jindapon, Tigran Melkonyan, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

This paper bridges large but separate literatures on decision-making under ambiguity, the dual system framework of behavioral economics, and market design. We characterize behavior under ambiguity arising from dual system preferences. Rational System 2 satisfies the subjective expected utility axioms while behavioral System 1 satisfies the obvious dominance axiom from mechanism design. Our axioms provide a novel foundation for the popular NEO-EU ambiguity model and allow for source dependent ambiguity perceptions. Our approach also provides an explanation as to how behavioral differences arise between obviously strategy-proof mechanisms (e.g. English auctions) and other mechanisms. Empirically, we find ambiguity perceptions are lower …

Review Of Poverty, By America, Linda Plitt Donaldson

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Employment And Self-Rated Depression Among Older Persons In Thailand, Seung Chun Paek, Ning Jackie Zhang

Journal of Health Research

Background: Increasing attention has been paid to productive engagement as an important protective factor against depression in older persons. This study assessed the impact of employment on self-rated depression among older persons in Thailand using a matched sample obtained from a propensity score matching method.

Methods: This study involved a cross-sectional secondary data analysis using the 2019 Health and Welfare Survey dataset. Descriptive analysis and ordered logistic regressions were used.

Results: The effect of employment was negative for self-rated depression with an adjusted odds ratio (AOR) of 1.417. This indicates that employment could reduce self-rated depression among older …

Financial-Legal Navigation Reduces Financial Toxicity Of Pediatric, Adolescent, And Young Adult Cancers, Jean Edward, Kimberly D. Northrip, Mary Kay Rayens, Andrea Welker, Rachel O'Farrel, Jennifer Knuf, Haafsah Fariduddin, Julia Costich, John A. D'Orazio

Markey Cancer Center Faculty Publications

Background: Pediatric, adolescent, and young adult patients with cancer and their caregivers are at high risk of financial toxicity, and few evidence-based oncology financial and legal navigation programs exist to address it. We tested the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effectiveness of Financial and Insurance Navigation Assistance, a novel interdisciplinary financial and legal naviga- tion intervention for pediatric, adolescent and young adult patients and their caregivers.

Methods: We used a single-arm feasibility and acceptability trial design in a pediatric hematology and oncology clinic and collected preintervention and postintervention surveys to assess changes in financial toxicity (3 domains: psychological response/ Comprehensive Score …

Taking Pleasure In Distinction: Unlocking Specialty Coffee Preference, Ondrej Mitas, Danny D. Han, Belle Struijer, Lotte Willems, Thomas H. Chatwick

Journal of Global Business Insights

Specialty coffee, comprising a tenth of the global coffee trade, is distinguished by its strict quality requirements and traceable origins. The diverse flavor profiles of specialty coffee raise demands on providers to serve individual taste preferences. Prior research has not sufficiently explored how to predict customer preferences for specific flavor profiles or how these preferences influence behavioral intentions such as revisiting or recommending a café. This study hypothesized that customer involvement, the extrinsic factors of coffee experience, and culinary risk-taking would predict flavor preference, which would in turn affect behavioral intentions. In an experiment involving 47 participants, individuals tasted and …

“Safe” Annuity Retirement Products And A Possible Us Retirement Crisis, Thomas E. Lambert, Christopher B. Tobe

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This paper examines a looming possible crisis in many Americans’ retirement plans due to the proliferation of annuity products in their retirement investment portfolios. As defined benefit pension plans have almost completely disappeared as a means of retirement savings and have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans over the last 40 to 50 years, a great number of private and public sector defined contribution retirement plans have become laden with insurance contracts called annuities. Of the remaining solid defined benefit plans many, through a process called Pension Risk Transfer are being converted to high-risk single entity annuities. Such products …