Makiko Nakamuro

Negative Assimilation: How Immigrants Experience Economic Mobility in Japan

This paper examines the economic mobility of foreign migrants in Japan. In a country that is largely regarded as homogeneous and closed to outsiders, how and to what extent do immigrants achieve economic success? A survey conducted by the authors revealed that the conventional assimilationist perspective does not fully explain immigrants’ economic success in Japan. Migrants from the West experience what Chiswick and Miller (2011) refer to as “negative assimilation.” That is, their earnings decline over time in Japan. While negative assimilation was not clearly observed among immigrants from neighboring Asian countries, wages among them did not increase with the length of their stay in Japan. For both groups, the skills they brought from abroad were found to be largely accountable for their economic success, while locally specific human capital, such as education acquired in the host society, did not contribute to their earnings.

What Are the Long-term Effects of Extracurricular Sports Activities for Children and Adolescents? Evidence from Japan Using a Nationwide Sample of Twins

Our research examines the causal relationship between children’s experiences in sports and their subsequent outcomes later on in life. Using the sample of Japanese twins that the authors collected through web-monitoring survey, we will look at the difference in children’s sports experiences at school between twin pairs. Our main research task is to examine, after controlling for the innate ability and family environments where the children were growing up, whether sports can help your life better.

Are Television and Video Games Really Harmful for Kids

Are watching television and playing video games really harmful for childrens development? This is a very intriguing question for both parents and policy circles, although measuring the rigorous effects is difficult due to data and methodological limitations. By making use of a unique longitudinal dataset with detailed information on childrens development and health, we examine the effect of hours of television watched or of video games played on school-aged childrens problem behavior, positive orientation to school, and obesity. The results drawn from the fixed and random effects models while controlling for the time-invariant unobserved omitted variables in this paper suggest that the answer to the question is yes and that the negative effect would be dramatically increased by an excessive amount of exposure to television or video games. However, the magnitude of the effect is small enough to be negligible. The results are robust to within twin fixed effects.