BACKGROUND: Japan is facing a rapid increase in the number of reported child maltreatment cases. Child maltreatment has long-term consequences for the victims, and unemployment rate is considered a strong predictor of it. However, only few studies have analyzed the causal relation between child maltreatment and the unemployment rate-particularly the effects of the latter on the former-in Japan. METHODS: Using prefecture-level longitudinal data from 2005 to 2016, we employed a fixed effects instrumental variable estimation. The estimation included a weighted average of the national unemployment rate across industries by industrial structures in 2005 as an instrument to identify the causal effects. RESULTS: The average local unemployment rate changed by approximately 50% from the peak to the bottom in the sample period. A 50% increase in local unemployment rates increased the number of reported child neglect cases and child deaths by 80% and 70% (statistically significant at the 5% level), respectively. Further, it increased cases of death due to external causes, unintentional injuries, and unintentional drowning by 146%, 217%, and 315% (statistically significant at the 5% level), respectively. CONCLUSION: The local unemployment rate is a risk factor for child maltreatment, resulting in children's death, especially as a result of unintentional drowning-the common cause of death due to child neglect. When the local unemployment rates rise, governments should allocate more financial and human resources for preventive measures to combat child deaths caused by neglect.

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IIPR Discussion Paper Series No.2022-001 ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zv2tA3BHQLftSbRks-4iw-NosXeXv_Ft/view )

This study aims to better understand the effects of retirement on health outcomes through a large-scale crosscountry study of the changes in health investment behaviors after retirement among the populations of seven developed countries. Much of the literature on retirement health consists of single-country studies which generally find that health investment behaviors are effective predictors of health outcomes. However, using Global Aging Data normalized to facilitate cross-country comparison, and exploiting differences in the financial incentives in the pension systems across countries as our identification strategy, we find that, even with a careful accounting of the differences in baseline retirement ages, the elderly do not uniformly change their health investment behaviors in retirement. Therefore, in a cross-country framework, health investment behaviors are not necessarily good predictors of health in retirement.

This paper investigates the heterogeneous effects of changes in instructional time on student achievement due to differences in instructional quality, using student test scores and data on teachers and schools from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), as well as a natural experiment caused by a 2002 Japanese curriculum standards revision that reduced instruction time for math but not for science for second-year junior high school (grade 8) students. The random matching of teachers and students in Japan and our application of the time dimension of panel data to two subjects, mathematics and science, allow us to control for unobserved heterogeneities such as individual fixed effects and school fixed effects. We confirm that instructional time is more effective in combination with higher-quality teachers, as measured by common indicators such as experience, schooling, and academic major. We also find that these effects are larger for students whose socioeconomic status (SES) is lower.

This paper analyzes the reasons for differences in the estimated effect of retirement on health in previous studies. We investigate these differences by focusing on the analysis methods used by these studies. Using various health indexes, numerous researchers have examined the effects of retirement on health. However, there are no unified views on the impact of retirement on various health indexes. Consequently, we show that the choice of analysis method is one of the key factors in explaining why the estimated results of the effect of retirement on health differ. Moreover, we re-estimate the effect of retirement on health by using a fixed analysis method controlling for individual heterogeneity and endogeneity of the retirement behavior. We analyze the effect of retirement on health parameters, such as cognitive function, self-report of health, activities of daily living (ADL), depression, and body mass index in eight countries. We find that the effects of retirement on self-report of health, depression, and ADL are positive in many of these countries.