Hitotsubashi University IER Economic Research Series – serie

This book inquires into the Capability Approach, a value theory of freedom, which crystalizes the interests of Marx, Welfare Economics, Social Choice, and Ethics. The capability approach has attracted many people as a promising interdisciplinary approach to human well-being and social worlds, finely overarching ethical and economic concerns. It has well challenged essential characteristics of welfare economics, which focuses on the criterion of efficiency with the concept of utility, by explicitly incorporating normative criteria such as agency, well-being and real freedom into positive analysis. However, it has a bit operational and methodological difficulties such that how to estimate an individual capability set which includes potential multi-dimensional functioning vectors. This book reminds the reader of what traditional economics has left behind, by examining historical backgrounds, scrutinizing philosophical foundations and providing an operational formulation of the capability approach: indispensable for understanding what the capability approach is about and what it can achieve.

This book inquires into the Capability Approach, a value theory of freedom, which crystalizes the interests of Marx, Welfare Economics, Social Choice, and Ethics. The capability approach has attracted many people as a promising interdisciplinary approach to human well-being and social worlds, finely overarching ethical and economic concerns. It has well challenged essential characteristics of welfare economics, which focuses on the criterion of efficiency with the concept of utility, by explicitly incorporating normative criteria such as agency, well-being and real freedom into positive analysis. However, it has a bit operational and methodological difficulties such that how to estimate an individual capability set which includes potential multi-dimensional functioning vectors. This book reminds the reader of what traditional economics has left behind, by examining historical backgrounds, scrutinizing philosophical foundations and providing an operational formulation of the capability approach: indispensable for understanding what the capability approach is about and what it can achieve.

This open access book examines the history and role of money. Money is often defined in terms of three interrelated functions: as a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. Researchers frequently discuss the first two functions, but tend to ignore unit of account. This book focuses on how a unit of account or denomination can be defined and can be derived from the monetary system. In the case of paper money and coins, we know how to determine the denomination of money based on the problem of the least number of weights defined by Bâchet and proved by Hardy and Wright (1960). However, in the case of digital or cryptocurrency, denomination may not matter because digital or cryptocurrency uses a wallet that is essentially denomination free: a wallet can contain any amount of currency without upper and lower limits. When people talk about the stablecoin, i.e. the stable price of digital and cryptocurrency with the major legal tender, they take a unit of account or denomination of digital or cryptocurrency as given. This arrangement destroys the nature of denomination free or decentralized autonomy as it were.Exploring how we can consolidate with these two views of denomination, this book will appeal to anyone interested in creating new digital or cryptocurrencies. It also serves as a textbook on central bank digital currency.

This open access book examines the history and role of money. Money is often defined in terms of three interrelated functions: as a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. Researchers frequently discuss the first two functions, but tend to ignore unit of account. This book focuses on how a unit of account or denomination can be defined and can be derived from the monetary system. In the case of paper money and coins, we know how to determine the denomination of money based on the problem of the least number of weights defined by Bâchet and proved by Hardy and Wright (1960). However, in the case of digital or cryptocurrency, denomination may not matter because digital or cryptocurrency uses a wallet that is essentially denomination free: a wallet can contain any amount of currency without upper and lower limits. When people talk about the stablecoin, i.e. the stable price of digital and cryptocurrency with the major legal tender, they take a unit of account or denomination of digital or cryptocurrency as given. This arrangement destroys the nature of denomination free or decentralized autonomy as it were.Exploring how we can consolidate with these two views of denomination, this book will appeal to anyone interested in creating new digital or cryptocurrencies. It also serves as a textbook on central bank digital currency.

This open access book investigates female employment and the gender gap in the labor market and households during China’s economic transition period. It provides the reader with academic evidence for understanding the mechanism of female labor force participation, the determinants of the gender gap in the labor market, and the impact of policy transformation on women’s wages and employment in China from an economics perspective. The main content of this book includes three parts―women’s family responsibilities and women’s labor supply (child care, parent care, and women’s employment), the gender gap in the labor market and society (gender gaps in wages, Communist Party membership, and participation in social activity), and the impacts of policy transformation on women’s wages and employment (the social security system and the educational expansion policy on women’s wages and employment) in China. This book provides academic evidence about these issues based on economics theories and econometric analysis methods using many kinds of long-term Chinese national survey data. This book is highly recommended to readers who are interested in up-to-date and in-depth empirical studies of the gender gap and women’s employment in China during the economic transition period. This book is of interest to various groups such as readers who are interested in the Chinese economy, policymakers, and scholars with econometric analysis backgrounds.

This book is a collection of papers from the Tokyo Center for Economic Research's (TCER) research project on Japan's financial markets and financial system, including: (1) Current Japanese situation of cashless payments for individuals and households, (2) The possibility that digital currencies replace the current payment system in which the banking system provides the means of credit transactions, (3) Long-turn measurement of the value added generated by Japan's financial intermediaries, with an overview of Japanese banking industry’s business model, (4) Regional financial institutions' recent efforts to support their clients’ businesses by consultation, (5) The impact of the digitalization of stock trading on the Japanese market: factor investing and high-frequency trading (HFT), (6) Analysis of theoretical and real-world portfolio allocations based on the concepts of model uncertainty and ambiguity aversion, (7) An empirical analysis on ESG investment in Japan, focusing on the heterogeneity of institutional investors, (8) Japanese firms’ corporate governance: financial vs internal governance, (9) Japanese companies’ use of corporate insurance as a company-wide decision-making process, (10) The coexistence of zombie firms and debt-free healthy firms since the 1990s. (11) The validity of Japanese government's liquidity provision for troubled firms during the financial crisis and the Covid-19 crisis.This is an open access book.