This paper investigates whether competition in the Japanese banking sector has improved in the last quarter of the 20th century. By estimating the first order condition of profit maximization, together with the cost function and the inverse demand function, we found that competition had improved, especially in the 1970s and in the first half of the 1980s. The results fail to reject a Cournot oligopoly for city banks for most of the period, while they do reject it for regional banks for the overall period. This suggests that competition among city banks was stronger than that among regional banks.

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for helpful comments, our research assistant Shinpei Sano for expeditiously double-checking the empirical results, and Emma Chao for her energetic research assistance collecting the information on newspaper headlines and illustrations. The collection of the happiness data analyzed in this paper was financed by a Center of Excellence grant from the

The findings attest to the moderating role of culture on Extraversion and life satisfaction and the importance of controlling for shared method variance.

In this paper, we investigate what people in Japan consider when deciding to take the influenza vaccination. We develop an economic model to explain the mechanism by which people decide to take the influenza vaccination. Using our model and the data obtained from a large-scale survey we conducted in Japan, we demonstrated that people make rational decisions about vaccinations after considering its cost and benefits. People consider the probability of infection, severity of the disease, and the vaccination's effectiveness and side effects. The time discount rate is another consideration because the timing of costs and benefits of the vaccination differ. Risk aversion (fearing the contraction of the flu and vaccination's side effects) also affects the decision. People also deviate from rationality-altruism and status quo bias play important roles in the decision-making. Overconfidence indirectly affects the decision via perception variables such as the subjective probability of infection and assessment of influenza's severity. The decision also depends on attributes such as gender, age, and marital status. If the general perception of flu and vaccination is inaccurate, supplying accurate information regarding those may increase or decrease the vaccination rate, depending on whether this perception is, respectively, higher or lower than the objective rates. Thus, we examine whether the general perception is biased. Our survey suggests that disseminating information on the vaccination's effectiveness may increase the rate of vaccination, whereas that on the probability of infection may have the opposite effect.