Empirical analysis on consumer behavior in Japan,US and Europe

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(1) Japan : This analysis examines changes in net worth in the Japanese householods in the period of the 1990s called Lost Decade and analyzes changes in consumer behavior due to the shock of the Bubble burst. The value of net worth in 1994 was about 30 percent of that in 1989. This drastic decline affected household saving behavior. The stimulus toward consumption for all households became weaker because of the depreciation of (unrealized) wealth experienced by almost all households when the Bubble burst. Using the Chow test the present paper concludes that a cohort made by cross-section is different from a cohort produced by from time series-cross section micro-data sets in the 1990s.(2) US and Japan : In many countries a gap between macroeconomic and microeconomic statistics is observed. To explain the gap, the present analysis tests the misreporting hypothesis originally proposed by Deaton and Irish (1984). The data used for estimation involves ten clusters of consumer durables fro … More m the Consumer Expenditure Survey in the U.S. Misreporting takes place if a household purchased goods but did not report the amount (type 1 misreporting), or it purchased goods but reported the amount incorrectly (type 2 misreporting). The variance of the measurement error in type 2 misreporting is small and is not statistically significant. The main source of underreporting is due to zero expenditure households that purchased goods but did not report the amount (type 1 misreporting).(3) Europe and Japan : Given the rapid aging of populations in advanced industrialized societies around the world, there is considerable interest about the attendant consequences. This analysis focuses on elderly consumer behavior in Europe and Japan. Regarding the demographic effect, we tested two types of specification such as translation and scaling including the equivalent adult scale known as the Amsterdam scale on food expenditure. Our finding indicates the Amsterdam scale is still workable for food expenditure adjustment in European countries. Less