Recent studies find that cash remains the dominant payment choice for small-value transactions despite the prevalence of alternative payment methods such as debit and credit cards. An important ...policy question is whether consumers truly prefer using cash or merchants restrict card usage. Using unique shopping diary data, we estimate a payment choice model with individual heterogeneity, controlling for merchants' acceptance of cards. Based on a policy simulation imposing universal card acceptance among merchants, we find that overall cash usage would decrease by only 8.0 percentage points, implying that cash usage in small-value transactions is driven mainly by consumer preferences.
Strategic interaction among firms may hinder the reduction of excess capacity in a declining industry. Policy interventions that attempt to reduce excess capacity may increase efficiency by ...accelerating the capital adjustment but may decrease efficiency by increasing the market power of firms and/or by distorting firms' divestment decisions. We study capacity coordination policies—forcing firms to reduce their capacity simultaneously—applied to the Japanese cement industry. Estimation results suggest that these interventions did not increase market power because reduction in capacity resulted in higher utilization of the remaining plants, and did not distort firms' scrappage decisions.
While the fuel economy of Japanese automobiles has improved by 40% in the past decade, gasoline consumption in the transportation sector from 2007 to 2016 only decreased by 4%. We seek to explain ...this discrepancy by investigating Japanese fuel economy standards and the financial incentives given to consumers of fuel-efficient cars. To do so, this study explores whether Japanese policies caused such a rebound effect, by employing the difference-in-difference framework. We find that these policies contribute to energy rebound effect, by enabling higher fuel consumption at lower costs and thus causing higher energy usages. We provide evidence that policies can increase not only fuel usage but also fuel costs. The main driving force behind the rebound effect is the increase in the sales of hybrid vehicles, induced by financial incentives.
•We find fuel usage and fuel cost rebounds in the Japanese transportation sector.•Incentives and standards towards fuel economy are positively correlated to rebounds.•Hybrid car sales and their driving distances are positively correlated to rebounds.•Light-duty vehicles contribute to the rebounds.
This paper empirically investigates how competition affects physicians’ opportunistic behavior in the context of the utilization of MRI scanners. We examine micro-panel data on Japanese hospitals, ...where we observe how physicians change their usage of MRI scanners in response to MRI adoption by nearby hospitals. We identify competition-driven physician-induced demand: Hospitals lose patients because of MRI adoption by nearby hospitals, and, to compensate for this loss, physicians perform more MRI scans per patient. Although competition may benefit consumers through better access to MRI scanners, it also causes additional physician-induced demand.
•We estimate the demand for automobiles in Japan.•Our result shows that Japanese preferences for fuel economy have decreased over time.•We simulate the emissions using counterfactual scenarios.•Both ...preference and technology are crucial for reducing CO2 emissions.
Which comes first in reducing the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions from the transportation sector: consumer preference or technological advancement? Using a series of discrete-choice demand models, we estimate the demand for automobiles in Japan. Our model explicitly allows consumer preferences for fuel economy to evolve over time, and the estimation results confirm the existence of such a change. We then simulate consumer behavior, enabling consumers in 2010 to choose automobiles from 2016, and vice versa. The results imply that both consumer preferences and technological advancement are important—without technological advancement and increases in consumers’ appreciation for fuel-efficient cars, CO2 emissions cannot be reduced.
Proportional reduction is a common cartel practice in which cartel members reduce their output proportionately. We develop a method to quantify this reduction relative to a benchmark market ...equilibrium scenario and relate the reduction to the traditional conduct parameter. Our measure is continuous, allowing us to have an intuitive interpretation as the "degree of collusion" and nesting the earlier models in the existing literature. Furthermore, our methodology addresses Corts' (1999) critique by estimating timevarying degree of collusion from a short panel of firm-level observations, exploiting firms' ex post heterogeneity. We illustrate the method using the Joint Executive Committee railroad cartel data.
This dissertation empirically studies demand complementarities in automobile purchases using newly collected Japanese household-level panel data, Keio Household Panel Survey. It is motivated by the ...observation that approximately one third of Japanese households own more than one automobile and they tend to hold particular combinations of products, which cannot be captured by the prevalent single choice model in this literature. The dissertation develops a structural model where consumers can purchase up to two differentiated products, where I allow for flexible complementarities which depend on consumer attributes and product characteristics. In the model, firms set the prices for their products, given other firms’ pricing strategies and consumer demand. I then estimate the model using two types of data: micro-level data on household automobile purchasing decisions and macro-level data on market share. My estimates suggest that strong complementarities arise when households purchase a combination of one small automobile and one regular-sized automobile, or one small automobile and one minivan as their portfolio. The estimates also indicate that households are more likely to purchase two automobiles as their numbers of earners increase or if they are located in rural areas. Ignoring such portfolio effects would lead to biased counterfactual analyses. For example, my results suggest that a policy proposal of repealing the current tax subsidies for eco-friendly small automobiles would decrease the demand for those automobiles by 12%, which is less than the 17% drop predicted by a standard single discrete choice model. Similarly, model simulations indicate that the presence of positive portfolio effects significantly influences firms’ pricing behavior: firms potentially have incentive to use a mixed bundling strategy when the number of products and firms in the market is small.
Consumers often purchase more than one differentiated product, assembling a portfolio, which might potentially affect substitution patterns of demand and, as a consequence, oligopolistic firms’ ...pricing strategies. To study such consumers’ portfolio considerations, this paper develops and estimates a structural model that allows for flexible complementarities/substitutabilities, using Japanese household-level data on automobile purchases. My estimates suggest that complementarities arise when households purchase a combination of one small automobile and one minivan as their portfolio. Simulation results suggest that, due to such portfolio considerations, a policy proposal of repealing the current tax subsidies for small eco-friendly automobiles would not necessarily sharply decrease the demand.
Induced Physician-Induced Demand Ikegami, Kei; Onishi, Ken; Wakamori, Naoki
IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc,
01/2020
Paper
Odprti dostop
Physicians may change their practices when introducing advanced medical equip-ment, and, in particular, they tend to overuse it. We investigate further in efficiency arising from physicians at ...surrounding hospitals. Using the panel data on the Japanese hospitals, we find that there exists a business-stealing effect: Hospitals lose their patients because of MRI adoption by nearby public hospitals, and, to compensate for the loss of patients, physicians take more MRI scans per patient. Our results suggest that the decision to adopt medical equipment needs to be made collectively rather than individually to avoid not only excessive adoption but also further physician-induced demand.
We study how government loan programs affect the growth of small businesses by examin-ing a unique policy-based small business lending program in Japan. Combining the loan-level program data with a ...financial statement database, we find that small business bor-rowers increase employment and asset levels after receiving the loan and that these effectspersist for several years. Differences in debt levels are persistent over time, cash holdings ofloan recipients fall in the long run, and the effects on asset levels are larger in magnitudethan those on employment. In addition, the effects are larger in magnitude for firms iden-tified as financially constrained. These results suggest that the government loan programis successful in relaxing binding financial constraints for small businesses that participatein the program.
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