第25回 社研・森口賞 受賞者


森口賞
Winner
元橋一輝(タフツ 大学)/ Kazuki Motohashi (Tufts University)
論文
Title
Unintented Consequences of Sanitation: Negative Externalities on Water Quality and Health in India
講評
Review
Kazuki hypothesizes that the construction of latrines could cause water pollution and negative health effects due to poor treatment of fecal sludge and estimates the negative externalities of a sanitation policy in India, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), that subsidized the construction of over 100 million latrines. Using geographical variations in soil characteristics and the heterogeneity of latrine coverage across India, he finds a worryingly large increase in river pollution by 72%. The negative externalities are larger, particularly in areas where dumping of fecal sludge is more likely to happen (areas with lower treatment capacities). He also shows that the SBM reduces diarrheal mortality by 36% overall. Kazuki nicely executes empirical investigations with well thought and carefully discusses robustness checks and data description details. Also, Kazuki's presentation was clear.
   


入選
Runner-up
周揚(神戸大学) / Yang Zhou (Kobe University)
論文
Title
Benefits and Costs: the Impact of Capital Control on Growth-at-risk in China
講評
Review
Yang investigates the marginal effect of China's capital control policies on the distribution of GDP growth in China by employing the GDP-at-risk measure, which is a kind of probability distribution of future GDP growth (IMF, 2017). Running quantile regression, he shows that capital control policies have positive effects on the 5th percentile of real GDP growth in mid-term periods, although such policies have negative effects on the 95th percentile of real GPD growth in long-term periods within the time frame. From the findings, he concludes that implementing an aggregate capital control policy mitigates the downside risk of real GDP growth in mid-term periods but dampens the upswing of GDP growth in longer periods. His attempts to quantify the effect of capital control policies are important in the literature on international finance. However, in the presentation, Yang should have explained his research background using enough time, although the time constraint is slightly severe

入選
Runner-up
深澤武志(東京大学) / Takeshi Fukasawa (University of Tokyo)
論文
Title
Firm’s Static Behavior under Dynamic Demand
講評
Review
Takeshi investigates sufficient conditions that firms' dynamic price-setting behavior can be approximated as static when they face a dynamic demand. He constructs an infinite-horizon discrete choice model with dynamic demand and random utility shocks and decomposes the first-order condition concerning a firm's pricing decision into three components: static, changing expectations of consumers, and forward-looking firms. He shows a sufficient condition that ensures a firm's dynamic price-setting behavior is not so far from static one; concretely, we can approximate a forward-looking firm's decisions by static ones when consumers' conditional choice probabilities (CCPs) of choosing the firm's product are small for all types of consumers and all state variables. Investigating the condition that we can approximate a forward-looking firm's decisions by static decisions is very interesting. However, in the presentation, Takeshi should have explained the detail of the specific cases that match the dynamic model.



2022年12月1日に報告会がおこなわれました。
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