Hitoshi Shigeoka

Do Risk Preferences Change? Evidence from Panel Data Before and After the Great East Japan Earthquake

We investigate whether individuals’ risk preferences change after experiencing a natural disaster, specifically, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Exploiting the panels of nationally representative surveys on risk preferences, we find that men who experienced greater intensity of the Earthquake became more risk tolerant after the Earthquake. Furthermore, these men gamble more, which is consistent with the direction of changes in risk preferences. We find no such pattern for women. Finally, the effects on men’s risk preferences are persistent even five years after the Earthquake at almost the same magnitude as those shortly after the Earthquake.

The Effectiveness of Demand-side Government Intervention to Promote Elderly Employment: Evidence from Japan

Since the pension eligibility age started to rise in 2001, there had been a gap between the eligibility age for full pension benefits and the prevailing retirement age in Japan. To fill the gap, the government of Japan revised the Elderly Employment Stabilization Law (EESL): starting from 2006, employers are legally obliged to introduce a system to continue employment up to the pension eligibility age. This paper examines the effect of this legal enforcement on elderly meni¯s labor supply and employment status, by comparing the affected cohorts and cohorts a few years older than them. We find that the EESL revision actually increases the employment rate of men in the affected cohorts in their early 60s, and the effect is larger for employees of the large firms. Also, the increase in elderly workers who stay in the same employer does not replace elderly workers who switch employers, suggesting that the revised EESL does not hinder elderly workeri¯s mobility.In this article, the authors examine the effect of a demand-side government intervention on employment of the elderly. The growing gap between the increasing pension eligibility age and the mandatory retirement age has emerged as a serious social concern in Japan. Starting in 2006, the government legally mandated employers to offer continuous employment up to the increased pension eligibility age. By comparing cohorts affected and unaffected by the policy, the authors find that such legal enforcement increases the employment rate of men in their early 60s. Furthermore, the effect is concentrated on employees at large-sized firms, where mandatory retirement was applied more strictly in the past. The authors then examine potential complementarity between pension reform—the conventional supply-side intervention—and the demand-side intervention. Evidence suggests that the impact of an increase in pension eligibility age on elderly employment is slightly larger when combined with legal demand-side enforcement.

School Entry Cutoff Date and the Timing of Births

Using birth records in Japan, where school entry rule is strictly enforced, this paper shows that more than 1,800 births a year are shifted from one week before the school entry cutoff date to one week following the cutoff date. Because older children perform better academically than their younger peers, parents who value potential long-term academic gains over the short-term gain of childcare cost savings do exploit birth timing as a means of early childhood investment. Heterogeneous responses by parents violate the assumption of regression discontinuity design that births around the school entry cutoff dates are random.

How Do Peers Impact Learning? An Experimental Investigation of Peer-to-Peer Teaching and Ability Tracking

Classroom peers are believed to influence learning by teaching each other, and the efficacy of this teaching likely depends on classroom composition in terms of peers’ ability. Unfortunately, little is known about peer-to-peer teaching because it is never observed in field studies. Furthermore, identifying how peer-to-peer teaching is affected by ability tracking—grouping students of similar ability—is complicated by the fact that tracking is typically accompanied by changes in curriculum and the instructional behavior of teachers. To fill this gap, we conduct a laboratory experiment in which subjects learn to solve logic problems and examine both the importance of peer-to-peer teaching and the interaction between peer-to-peer teaching and ability tracking. While peer-to-peer teaching improves learning among low-ability subjects, the positive effects are substantially offset by tracking. Tracking reduces the frequency of peer-to-peer teaching, suggesting that low-ability subjects suffer from the absence of high-ability peers to teach them.