要旨：2011年3月に発生した東日本大震災は、日本に多大なる被害をもたらした。そして、その予想を上回る被害の大きさは、被災地住民に物理的かつ精神的なショックを与えた。こうした大規模な自然災害は、人々の選好、および、意思決定を変化させる可能性があると考えられる。そこで、本研究は出生率に焦点を当て、東日本大震災による人々の意思決定への影響を検証することを目的とする。そのため、市区町村のパネルデータを用いて、Difference-in-Differenceにより、震災前後の出生に関わる意思決定の変化を推定した。その結果、被災地はそうでない地域と比較して出生率が有意に減少したことが分かった。

要旨：This paper proposes a new approach to estimate willingness-to-pay (WTP) for each attribute of alternatives. Our approach is based on a new conjoint-survey experiment design (Hainmueller, et., al. 2013) and empirical welfare-analysis (Bhattacharya 2015), which allows us to nonparametrically estimate the distribution of WTP without strong assumptions on individual preference. Moreover, if the utility is assumed as the quasi-linear form, the lower and upper bounds of the average WTP can be estimated with limited sample size. We illustrate our approach with the conjoint-survey data on Japanese young workers. Our estimation results show that they have higher WTP for working location, promotion opportunity, transfer, and over-time workings than other attributes.

要旨：Analysis of the urban agglomeration of economic activity has focused on its benefits for firm productivity. But the marginal-cost savings which agglomeration brings about also free up inputs that can be used to produce higher-quality goods, with their own profitability potential. We use plant-product-level data from Japanese manufacturing to examine agglomeration’s influences on product quality. Results confirm that quality does grow with regional market size, suggesting polices aimed at encouraging urban agglomeration improve competitiveness by raising product quality as well as productivity. Total factor productivity alone, therefore, underestimates agglomeration benefits by ignoring the quality incentives that accompany it.