Yasutora Watanabe

Inferring Strategic Voting

We estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes. Because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes, we adopt a set estimator. Using Japanese general-election data, we …nd a large fraction [75.3%, 80.3%] of strategic voters, only a small fraction [2.4%, 5.5%] of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred (misaligned voting). Existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two, estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting. Accordingly, while our estimate of strategic voting is high, our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies.

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.

Delivering Bad News: Market Responses to Negligence

One of the goals of the legal liability system is to ensure that sellers provide appropriate care. Reputation effects may also deter negligence. The little available research evidence suggests that reputation effects are minimal, however. We develop a theory tailored to an environment, such as medicine, in which sellers are of heterogeneous quality and face two types of demand—private consumers who exhibit downward-sloping demand (for example, private health insurance) and government consumers who exhibit perfectly elastic demand at a fixed price (for example, Medicaid insurance). The theory predicts that high-quality sellers who suffer reputation losses will see their caseloads shift from private to government patients, while low-quality sellers will lose government patients and may gain private patients. Combining individual patient-level data from Florida for the years 1994–2003 with physician-level litigation data, we find evidence that physicians experience reputation effects that are consistent with the theory.

A Note on Estimation of Two-Sided Matching Models

We propose an estimation strategy for two-sided matching models with non-transferable utility based on the characterization using pre-matching that exploits a fixed-point characterization of the set of stable matchings.

The Impact of Physician Supply on the Healthcare System: Evidence from Japan's New Residency Program

Using a 2004 Japanese natural experiment affecting physician supply, we study the physician labor market and its effects on hospital exits and health outcomes. Although physicians play a central role in determining the performance of a healthcare system, identifying their impacts are difficult because physician supply is endogenously determined. We circumvent the problem by exploiting an exogenous shock to physician supply created by the introduction of a new residency program - our natural experiment. Based on panel data covering all physicians in Japan, we find that the introduction of a new residency program substantially decreased the supply of physicians in some rural markets where local hospitals had relied on university hospitals for filling physician positions. We also find that physician market wages increased in the affected markets relative to less affected markets. Finally, we find that this change in physician market wages forced hospitals to exit affected markets and negatively affected patient health outcomes in those markets. These effects may be exacerbated by the fact that the healthcare market was rigidly price-regulated. Copyright

Estimating Supermodular Games Using Rationalizable Strategies

We propose a set-estimation approach to supermodular games using the restrictons of rationalizable strategies, which is a weaker solution concept than Nash equilibrium. The set of rationalizable strategies of a supermodular game forms a complete lattice, and are bounded above and below by two extremal Nash equilibria. We use a well-known alogrithm to compute the two extremal equilibria, and then construct moment inequalities for set estimation of the supermodular game. Finally, we conduct Monte Carlo experiments to illustrate how the estimated confidence sets vary in response to changes in the data generating process.