第24回 社研・森口賞 受賞者




森口賞
Winner
阿部達也(早稲田大学)/ Tatsuya Abe (Waseda University)
論文
Title
Welfare Effects of Fuel Tax and Feebate Policies in the Japanese New Car Market
講評
Review
This paper studies the welfare impact of the fuel tax and feebate policies in the Japanese automobile market. The author considers household decisions on car ownership and utilization in a structural model to account for the rebound effect in evaluating the two policy impacts. The author estimates the parameters of the discrete-continuous choice model jointly by combining household survey data and aggregate new automobile sales data from 2006 to 2013, dealing with car price endogeneity. The paper finds that the fuel tax leads to a decrease in overall social welfare while inducing a reduction in carbon emissions. On the other hand, the feebates increase overall social welfare despite the policy increasing carbon emissions via the rebound effect. The assessment of rebate policies is an important topic in both empirical industrial organization and environmental economics. The major contribution of this paper is that the author estimated the automobile choice and driving demand simultaneously using data in the Japanese market. The author is suggested to think hard about the value of the estimation strategy compared with the existing studies. Furthermore, it may be useful to consider the heterogeneous effects of the abatement policies on different manufacturers or automobiles with various features.

   



入選
Runner-up
大谷克 / Suguru Otani (Rice University)
論文
Title
Estimating Endogenous Coalitional Mergers: Merger Costs and Assortativeness of Size and Specialization
講評
Review
This paper studies the role of government subsidies to foster the consolidation of the Japanese shipping industry between 1960 and 1964. The author employs a one-sided many-to-many matching model with transferable utilities and, using hand-collected data, recovers structural parameters that describe a set of mergers in the shipping industry. The model estimates indicate that a key motivation of mergers is the incentive to technological diversification, and the counterfactual simulations show that the government provided too generous subsidies. Overall, the paper studies an ambitious problem, and the author collects the data and executes structural estimation very carefully. However, the prize committee strongly encourages the author to reconsider the modeling choice. The author discusses the inefficiency of excess entry behind the motivation of government subsidies, but it is not clear whether the current model has such excess entry. Moreover, some assumptions are strong. For example, the author assumes that the subsidy amounts are the same across firms, and this assumption does not seem realistic and might bias the results significantly.



入選
Runner-up
高橋裕希 / Yuki Takahashi (University of Bologna)
論文
Title
Gender Differences in the Cost of Corrections in Group Work
講評
Review
Group work is synonymous with a constant exchange of ideas, which often involves receiving criticism and corrections and refining the ideas subsequently. However, people may take the corrections personally and are less willing to collaborate with a person who has corrected them even if this correction is beneficial. Recent literature suggests that this negative perception about receiving corrections is more visible when the correction is made by women. This paper, with a quasi-laboratory experiment, shows that participants, including those with high productivity, are less willing to collaborate with a person who has corrected them even if the correction improves group performance; participants do not necessarily respond more negatively to corrections by women; participants react more negatively to good corrections than to bad corrections. These findings suggest while participants are not harsher against women's corrections, their dislike toward being corrected is costly for both the individual and the group, as well as irrational.

   



2022年1月18日に授賞式・懇親会がおこなわれました。

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