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"Consumer behavior Japan History."
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Consumer culture and postmodernism
The First Edition of this contemporary classic can claim to have put ′consumer culture′ on the map, certainly in relation to postmodernism. Updated throughout, this expanded new edition includes a fully revised preface that explores the developments in consumer culture since the First Edition. Among the most noteworthy areas discussed are the effect of global warming on consumption, the rise of the new rich, changes in the North/South divide and the new diversity of consumer culture. The result is a book that shakes the boundaries of debate, from one of the foremost writers on culture and postmodernism of the present day.
eBook
Waste
InWaste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste-in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources-from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people's ever-changing concerns and hopes.
Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan's postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people lived-how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday.
eBook
Product Innovation, Product Diversification, and Firm Growth
We explore how firms grow by adding products. We leverage detailed data from Japan’s cotton spinning industry at the turn of the last century to do so. This setting allows us to fully characterize the type of differentiation (vertical or horizontal) of new product introductions as well as whether the product is within or outside of the firm’s prior technological capabilities. We find that trying to introduce innovative products beyond the firm’s previous technologically feasible set, even if such trials fail, is a key to firm growth. Indeed, it mostly facilitates growth through the firm’s later success in horizontal product diversification. In long-term outcomes, the right tail of the firm size distribution becomes dominated by firms that first moved into technologically challenging products and then later applied their newly acquired technical competence to horizontal expansion of their product portfolios. Two mechanisms through which this knowledge transfer occurs are greater production system flexibility and higher product appeal to downstream buyers.
Journal Article
Nationalism and Economic Exchange: Evidence from Shocks to Sino-Japanese Relations
We study the impact of nationalism and interstate frictions on international economic relations by analyzing market reaction to adverse shocks to Sino-Japanese relations in 2005 and 2010. Japanese companies with high China exposure suffer relative declines during each event window; a symmetric effect is observed for Chinese companies with high Japanese exposure. The effect on Japanese companies is more pronounced for those operating in industries dominated by Chinese state-owned enterprises, whereas firms with high Chinese employment experience lower declines. These results emphasize the role of countries' economic and political institutions in mediating the impact of interstate frictions on firm-level outcomes.
Journal Article
Resident Networks and Corporate Connections: Evidence from World War II Internment Camps
Using customs and port authority data, we show that firms are significantly more likely to trade with countries that have a large resident population near their firm headquarters, and that these connected trades are their most valuable international trades. Using the formation of World War II Japanese internment camps to isolate exogenous shocks to local ethnic populations, we identify a causal link between local networks and firm trade. Firms are also more likely to acquire target firms, and report increased segment sales, in connected countries. Our results point to a surprisingly large role of immigrants as economic conduits for firms.
Journal Article
Religious reforms and large-scale rebellions (via the case of the Honganji sect of the True Pure Land Buddhism)
The paper explores the economics behind two large-scale rebellions in Japan throughout 1532–1536 and 1570–1580, launched by a religious organization called Honganji. The paper argues that Honganji’s large-scale rebellions took off primarily due to religious reforms, particularly, the creation of an after-life pardon doctrine, which enabled the functioning of more potent incentives that fostered participation. First, the doctrine raised the costs of not joining a rebellion by excluding the non-participants and consigning them to hell. This resulted in immediate spiritual, social and economic penalties, as condemned individuals were considered religiously corrupt and were expelled from the sect’s temple towns and sect-dominated village communities. Second, the after-life pardon doctrine reduced the costs of rebellious participation by guaranteeing an instant rebirth in paradise after dying for the sect’s cause. As many individuals at the time saw the world through the lens of religion and spirituality, the guarantee of paradise was an especially potent incentive to join a rebellion.
Journal Article
Who spent their COVID-19 stimulus payment? Evidence from personal finance software in Japan
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, governments worldwide have been formulating and implementing different strategies to mitigate its social and economic impacts. We study the household consumption responses to Japan’s COVID-19 unconditional cash transfer program. Owing to frequent delays in local governments’ administrative procedures, the timing of the payment to households varied unexpectedly. Using this natural experiment, we analyze households’ consumption responses to cash transfers using high-frequency data from personal finance management software that links detailed information on expenditure, income, and wealth. We construct three consumption measures: one captures the baseline marginal propensity to consume (MPC), and the other two are for the lower and the upper bound of MPC. Additionally, we explore heterogeneity in MPCs by household income, wealth, and population characteristics, as well as consumption categories. Our results show that households exhibit immediate and non-negligible positive responses in household expenditure. There is significant heterogeneity depending on various household characteristics, with liquidity constraint status being the most crucial factor, in line with the standard consumption theory. Additionally, this study provides policymakers with insights regarding targeted cash transfer programs, conditioning on labor income, and liquidity constraints.
Journal Article
Health Shocks, Recovery, and the First Thousand Days: The Effect of the Second World War on Height Growth in Japanese Children
This article uses the health shock on Japanese civilians of the Second World War to understand the effects of health shocks at different developmental stages on children's long‐run growth pattern and to test whether recovery is possible after an early‐life health shock. We construct a prefecture‐level dataset of mean heights of boys and girls aged 6–19 from 1929 to 2015. Linking the heights recorded at different ages for the same birth cohort, we measure a counterfactual causal effect of the health shocks during the Second World War on the cohort growth pattern of children. We find that the war effect was greatest for cohorts exposed to the war in late childhood and adolescence: these cohorts were 1.7–3.0 cm shorter at adulthood and had delayed pubertal growth and slower maturation than they would have had if the war had never occurred. However, there were no persistent health penalties for children exposed to the war in early life, suggesting that catch‐up growth was possible as health conditions improved after the war. These findings challenge the thousand‐days consensus that children cannot recover from nutritional shocks in early life and indicate that adolescence is a sensitive period for health shocks.
Journal Article
The Political Origins of Primary Education Systems: Ideology, Institutions, and Interdenominational Conflict in an Era of Nation-Building
This paper is concerned with the development of national primary education regimes in Europe, North America, Latin America, Oceania, and Japan between 1870 and 1939. We examine why school systems varied between countries and over time, concentrating on three institutional dimensions: centralization, secularization, and subsidization. There were two paths to centralization: through liberal and social democratic governments in democracies, or through fascist and conservative parties in autocracies. We find that the secularization of public school systems can be explained by path-dependent state-church relationships (countries with established national churches were less likely to have secularized education systems) but also by partisan politics. Finally, we find that the provision of public funding to private providers of education, especially to private religious schools, can be seen as a solution to religious conflict, since such institutions were most common in countries where Catholicism was a significant but not entirely dominant religion.
Journal Article