While there is now something of a consensus in the economics of happiness literature that income comparisons to others help determine subjective well-being, debate continues over the relative importance of own and reference-group income, in particular in research on the Easterlin paradox. The variety of results in this domain have produced some scepticism regarding happiness analysis, and in particular with respect to the measurement of reference-group income. We here use data from an original Internet survey in Japan to compare the relative-income results from happiness regressions to those from hypothetical-choice experiments. This kind of validation of experienced utility via direct comparison with decision utility remains rare in this literature. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Considering the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake, we use the experienced-utility approach to appraise the psychological distress from disaster-related news. We take advantage of the serendipitous timing of our original nationwide weekly panel survey that became a fitting resource for the investigation of subjective well-being in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Although all of Japanese society was affected, we found geographical heterogeneity between the affected areas (Sendai and Tokyo) and the unaffected areas in terms of mental costs. Our finding reminds us of the focusing effect (Kahneman et al., 2006; Dolan and Kahneman, 2008) as captured by Schkade and Kahneman (1998) in the maxim "Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it".

There are various methods by which people can express subjective evaluations quantitatively. For example, happiness can be measured on a scale from 1 to 10, and has been suggested as a measure of economic policy. However, there is resistance to these types of measurement from economists, who often regard welfare to be a cardinal, unbounded quantity. It is unclear whether there are differences between subjective evaluation reported on ordinal, bounded scales and on cardinal, unbounded scales. To answer this question, we developed functional magnetic resonance imaging experimental tasks for reporting happiness from monetary gain and the perception of visual stimulus. Subjects tended to report higher values when they used ordinal scales instead of cardinal scales. There were differences in neural activation between ordinal and cardinal reporting scales. The posterior parietal area showed greater activation when subjects used an ordinal scale instead of a cardinal scale. Importantly, the striatum exhibited greater activation when asked to report happiness on an ordinal scale than when asked to report on a cardinal scale. The finding that ordinal (bounded) scales are associated with higher reported happiness and greater activation in the reward system shows that overstatement bias in happiness data must be considered.

This paper evaluates how caste influences economic comparisons in India. Using happiness data from an original panel survey, we find that both within-caste comparisons and between-caste comparisons reduce well-being. Between-caste comparisons reduce well-being three times more than within-caste comparisons. In absolute terms, an increase in rival caste expenditures affects well-being as much as primary expenditure. These findings highlight the strong influence that comparisons between rival castes have on well-being. Yet this comparison scheme turns out to be asymmetrical: only low-caste individuals are affected by the economic successes of their rivals, whereas only higher-caste individuals compete with their fellows. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Humans typically discount future gains more than losses. This phenomenon is referred to as the "sign effect" in experimental and behavioral economics. Although recent studies have reported associations between the sign effect and important social problems, such as obesity and incurring multiple debts, the biological basis for this phenomenon remains poorly understood. Here, we hypothesized that enhanced loss-related neural processing in magnitude and/or delay representation are causes of the sign effect. We examined participants performing intertemporal choice tasks involving future gains or losses and compared the brain activity of those who exhibited the sign effect and those who did not. When predicting future losses, significant differences were apparent between the two participant groups in terms of striatal activity representing delay length and in insular activity representing sensitivity to magnitude. Furthermore, participants with the sign effect exhibited a greater insular response to the magnitude of loss than to that of gain, and also a greater striatal response to the delay of loss than to that of gain. These findings may provide a new biological perspective for the development of novel treatments and preventive measures for social problems associated with the sign effect.

We extend a second-generation Schumpeterian growth model to incorporate human capital accumulation to clarify the general equilibrium effects of subsidy policies on human capital accumulation and R&D activities in a unified framework. Despite the conventional argument that subsidies always stimulate these growth-promoting activities, we find that subsidies asymmetrically affect human capital accumulation and R&D activities. Our theoretical results suggest that research using standard models of human capital might find false negative relationships between education subsidies and economic growth.

We propose a new avenue for studying income comparisons effects, namely hypothetical discrete choice experiments in which respondents are presented with alternative combinations of hypothetical monthly income amounts, both for themselves and certain reference persons. With this experimental method we can avoid the problems associated with researcher-imposed reference persons' incomes that are found in most of the happiness studies testing comparison effects. This approach allows investigation of the differences in comparison effects across types of reference groups as well as respondents' individual characteristics, including specific comparison benchmarks, which are the main open questions in the literature. Some results from our original, large-scale, Internet-based survey are provided. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper presents a numerical examination of sustainability from the perspective of 'genuine savings', using a dataset provided by the World Bank. Unlike previously-used criteria of sustainability that focus on observed paths of genuine savings rates, we consider future sustainability by simulating future paths of genuine savings. This analysis shows that some countries that had been classified as being sustainable by previous studies, using observed paths, are in fact, not sustainable from the perspective of future sustainability. We provide information on capital components which should be targeted by policy makers in order to maintain future sustainability. Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

This paper estimates the economic value in the 1980s and 1990s of corporate assets in Japan, including both tangible and intangible assets, based on the neoclassical framework of McGrattan and Prescott (2005). Our estimates use a new micro-data set that comprises the accounting statements of all listed, non-financial companies in Japan. We find that in 1980-1986, a period that immediately preceded Japan's so-called "bubble economy", our assessed value of corporate productive assets, net of the value of corporate debt, is approximately equal to the actual stock market value of Japanese corporate equity. The finding differs from previous results based on studies of aggregate data sets or based on studies of micro-data sets that neglected intangible capital. We also show that the Japanese ratio of the amount of intangible capital stock to the amount of tangible capital stock is comparable to the analogous ratios for the U.S. and U.K. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This paper presents a dynamic general equilibrium model in which consumers have status preference. I investigate the manner in which capital accumulation is impeded by conspicuous consumption ala Comeo and Jeanne [Corneo, G., Jeanne, 0., 1997a. Conspicuous consumption, snobbism and conformism. Journal of Public Economics 66, 55-71]. Following the literature, social norms are given as either bandwagon type or snob type. I show that when the economy is characterized by a bandwagon type social norm, capital accumulation exhibits interesting patterns. Those patterns include, for example, an oscillating convergence path: the rise of the economy feeds its decay through conspicuous consumption and that decay suppresses conspicuous consumption and engenders prosperity, as predicted by Sombart [Sombart, W., 1912. Liebe, Luxus und Kapitalismus, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Germany (reprinted 1967)]. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

I conducted an internet-based large-scale survey of hypothetical choice experiment on the relative utility hypothesis which posits that human being make decisions taking into account not only their own conditions but also consequences of their behavior on social interactions. I showed that not only the intensity but also the distribution of relative utility are different across specific comparison benchmarks, and across types of reference groups people are facing in the experiments. The relative utility effect among Japanese respondents is found to be not as strong as can validate the Easterlin paradox.

既存の幸福経済学研究をさらに精緻化する分析を行い,海外でその成果を報告した. これまでの幸福の経済学の文脈では,他者の所得の代理変数としてミンサー型の賃金方程式を推計しその当てはめ値を用いてきたが,この伝統的なアプローチには批判があるのも事実である.つまり,この方法論が正しいとすると,他者の所得を考えるとき,人々が計量経済学者と同じ方法を用いていることになり,そのような仮定は行動経済学的な見地からもっともらしくないと考えられている.同種の批判は経済学の文脈でもバーバルな議論として存在するが,明確な形で批判的証拠を提出したものは,私の知る限り存在しない.そこで,応募者の研究では他者の賃金の代理変数として,(1)サーベイで得られた主観的他者賃金と,(2)賃金関数の推計値から得られた伝統的な他者賃金の二つを用い,両者の結果の比較を行っている.結論として,社会的地位選好効果は,(1)の情報で確認される一方,(2)の代理変数を用いた場合,地位選好効果についての証拠は明確には示されなかった.この原因として,(1)においては他者賃金の推測値が,自己の賃金よりも高くなるというシステマティックなパターンが見られ,その「嫉妬」が他者賃金の主観的仕事満足度に対する負の効果として捉えられる一方で,(2)の情報では他者賃金の予測についての「妬み効果」が弱くなり,推計式において,地位選好効果としてあらわれない,ということがあげられる.論文の結論としては,(2)のミンサー賃金関数の当てはめ値としての他者賃金は,市場の平均を反映するのみで,自己の賃金よりも相対的に高くなることを事前には保証しないことが,社会的地位選好の分析にとって問題であることを指摘した.