This paper examines the effect of parents' social skills on children's sociability, using the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). This survey, like some other national surveys, lacks detailed information on parents; to remedy this deficiency, we construct a measure of parents' "sociability" skills based on their occupational characteristics from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). The sociability relationship varies across parents and children by gender, but remains statistically significant (especially between fathers and sons), even after controlling for a variety of other background characteristics.JEL Classification: J24; J62.

This paper identifies sharp bounds on the mean treatment response and average treatment effect under the assumptions of both the concave-monotone treatment response (concave-MTR) and the monotone treatment selection (MTS). We use our bounds and the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to estimate mean returns to schooling. Our upper-bound estimates are substantially smaller than (i) estimates using only the concave-MTR assumption of Manski (1997), and (ii) estimates using only the MTR and MTS assumptions of Manski and Pepper (2000). Our upper-bound estimates fall in the range of the point estimates given in previous studies that assume linear wage functions.

This paper examines whether and how the marital satisfaction of Japanese couples is related to the housework the spouse performs. For single-earner couples, both husbands and wives are more satisfied with the other spouse if the wife performs the greater share of the housework on weekdays. In dual-earner couples, both husbands and wives experience higher spousal satisfaction when the other spouse performs more housework on weekdays. Japanese dual-earner couples are unable to spend more time on housework, because wives are already performing a significant share of housework on weekdays while husbands are working long hours.JEL Classification: J12, J22

Using the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR), which is a new Japanese panel survey of people aged 50 and over, we find that more Japanese in their early 50s expect their level of public pension benefits to decline compared with those in their late 50s and early 60s. We also find that recent pension reforms that raised the pensionable age affected the Japanese population by increasing the age at which they expect to claim their benefits by almost the exact same amount as the increase in the pensionable age. The reforms have also decreased the population's expectations about receiving public pension benefits, although this effect is not necessarily significant. We also find evidence that anxiety about the public pension programme's future increases private savings.

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