Toshihiro Okubo

1. The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has generated profound disruptions to economic activity worldwide, particularly in service and leisure industries that rely on on-site inte...

As artificial intelligence advances, must support for the technology come at the welfare state's expense? In a 14-wave Japanese panel spanning ChatGPT's arrival, we find no such trade-off, on two margins: beliefs and jobs. Within person, support for AI and support for redistribution move together, a link that weakens where success is read as earned, not lucky. Across occupations, the most exposed workers --- educated and higher-income, whom income-based self-interest predicts to resist redistribution --- moved toward redistribution relative to the least exposed as AI diffused, while their AI attitudes moved like everyone else's. Overall, these results suggest that voters bundle support for the technology with demand for compensation.

When are people willing to donate their time or money after a disaster? We investigate the psychological and socio‐economic determinants of post‐disaster giving in Japan, using a nationally representative panel survey of more than 7,000 respondents, conducted repeatedly from early 2020, including after the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake. We examine how individual characteristics—including past disaster experience, social capital (trust, reciprocity, cooperation), ‘Big‐5’ personality traits, and digital behaviours—influence the likelihood of engaging in various forms of post‐disaster assistance, from traditional monetary donations to newer digitally‐facilitated acts such as online shopping for Noto products. Our analysis finds that prior disaster experience and personal openness are consistent robust predictors of prosocial behaviour. The relationship between social capital and aid activities is more subtle. Trust and cooperation are both positively associated with post‐disaster assistance, but this is not the case for reciprocity. These findings emphasise that nuanced conceptualisation of social capital is required and underscore the need for caution in assuming its universal relevance in mobilising disaster aid. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research that more precisely delineate the interplay between social, psychological, and socio‐economic factors in shaping post‐disaster giving.

In Japan in the 1920s, several financial crises and government policy led to bank mergers and the consolidation and expansion of branch networks. Using unique historical bank branch-level lending and deposit data, we show that branch banking integrated peripheral markets with the rest of the country, with large urban banks – those headquartered in Tokyo and Osaka – using deposit supply shocks in peripheral areas to fund lending in their core markets. While these findings support contemporary concerns about branch banking draining funds from peripheral markets, we argue that the export of liquidity by urban banks likely represented an efficient reallocation of credit, driven primarily by competition in funding markets. Faced with high-yielding lending opportunities in central prefectures, urban banks bid up deposit rates in peripheral areas, raising local banks’ funding costs. Local banks responded by lowering intermediation margins and reducing lending to traditional industries, which suggests that they shifted their lending to less risky and more efficient customers. We speculate that this competitive reallocation of capital across regions and sectors allowed banks to maintain a functional specialization in different customer segments, which may explain the continued coexistence of small relationship lenders and large integrated arm’s-length lenders in local banking markets.

We explore the role that large fires played in the early development of the Japanese fire insurance industry. Using a prefecture-level data set spanning 30 years, our econometric analysis shows that large fires led to an increase in new policies and policy renewals, consistent with historical narratives that insurance companies used these events to advertise their business. We also show that this subsequent surge in policies led to more small fires due to arson. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is more likely to have been due to moral hazard rather than adverse selection.