What is a typical Japanese? -- or the question of who I am.

What is a typical Japanese?

This question has arisen since I started friendships with many people from other countries when I was a GraSPP student. For example, when we went drinking, Japanese culture is alway the topic. Since they are in Todai and Tokyo, they don't know what usual Japanese seem.

However, when I watched a famous movie by Studio Ghibli, I found that actually I myself don't know what Japanese people are precisely. Even though I was brought up in Fukui, a countryside, my family belonged to the middle-class there and we lived in the centre of Fukui Prefecture.(actually it took just 5 mins walk to the prefecture headquarter office from my home.) And I recalled my childhood in Fukui with keen nostalgia.

Of course, there is no "typical Japanese (family)." This is just an idealized existence that are only in our imagination. However, I believe that I can categorize Japanese people into some(if a lot) typical groups.

The anime movie, "おもひでぽろぽろ(1991)" describes two typical lives of Japanese people. The one is about an experience of working holiday at a countryside of Yamagata of a woman named Taeko in 1982 (a bit old). She is 27 years old, unmarried and woking for a company. The other story is about her childhood in 1966. The old Taeko decides to take trip to visit her elder sisters-in-law in the rural countryside to help with the safflower harvest and get away from city life. This experience reminds her of the childhood in Tokyo, which made the young Taeko desire to take holidays outside Tokyo. (Her family seems not to have relatives who live in a rural city until her sister got married.)

This movie reminded me of two things: a rural life; the days of my childhood, which I almost forgot. Speaking of a rural life, I don't know well about it. I had relatives who lived in a very rural place, but I have nerver joined cropping or harvest. They lived in a large house with as large a warehouse. They possessed some fields.Again, I couldn't image what their life was like.

On the other hand, Taeko's story of her childhood clearly illustrates children's life in elementary schools in Japan, except for TV games or desktop or laptop PCs. My life in elementary or junior-high school is ordinal one and similar to Takeko's. In the age of 25, now I remember the mundane, sometimes foolish, but precious time which I can never experience again. Alas,...

In sum, I partly know typical Japanese experience like a life in school. On the other hand, I don't know what the very rural life is like. I am not sure I will be able to get accustomed to rural life, but I want to lead such a life someday.

To tackle societal problems, not to learn them.

I read this essay on AIDS prevention in Africa.

AIDS prevention: Abstinence vs. risk reduction

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3461

This post was a bit old (in 2009), I thought about why I am going to master economics.
I am not interested in the economics in developing countries.

In this essay, we can't find any equations. It is insightful, however, and make us realize that
how meaningless abstinence, of which importance was reiterated by churches,  is to prevent AIDS prevention and to encourage a safe sex.

What societal problem do I want to solve? Or, at least, what do I think is A problem?
I am now enjoying learning tools and problems in present. I wanna improve the economic situation in Japan and make a contribution to it. But HOW? That is a problem of my own.
And actually this has been clear to me since I read Prof. Iwamoto's essay on how to lead a doctoral days of economics.

Again, I have to face on myself.

A Vicarious experience

One month and a few days are left before the new semester starts. On my side, I am full of anxiety and worried about my grade in the next semester and my future career. Now I am preparing for the coming classes, especially studying math(baby-rudin), macroeconomics(Romer's advanced one) and TOEFL.

It seems that I am improving on my English skill(or score), but I am not sure that this strategy is sufficiently good, or, first of all, that I am so competent that I will be able to continue studying after the master course.

On the other side, a friend of mine has been suffering from back-to-back rejections. She is not rejected by all the schools she applied to, so there are still chances to be accepted by other schools, whether or not she does accept them.

She said that she might have not grappled with the difficulties she had faced and was too lenient on herself. Frankly speaking, I don't know how smart she is because I am not an supervisor of her. Of course she looks to me smarter than me and other students.

During my university life, I have to admit, I was too lenient on myself. I did not continue belonging to almost all the activities I had joined, or didn't study so seriously. What is worse, I made a huge mistake in determining my career. I was not able to get a job I really wanted to do, nor I could not stay in a company I reluctantly decided to work for. It might because I was not suitable to the job, or just because I was so bad at interview, or, most plausibly, because I didn't make every effort as the winners did.

The circumstances where she is reminds me of the miserable and next-to-meaningless days of last six years. I do not mean that she is not working hard, or her experience in the graduate school is nothing. She will grasp an opportunity to the prestigious career in some day. The problem is that I can discipline myself and take a chance in the next two years, and moreover, I will be able to owe all results to myself. We don't have a "Wherever door", anyway.

4. Digression on the theoretical unverpinnings of debt crises

• Sovereign Lending

The main determinant of default is willingness to pay rather than ability to pay

• Illiquidity versus Insolvency

-Another important concept

Illiquidity: a short-term funding problem 

Insolvency: not willing and/or able to service its debt indefinitely

short-term borrowing often carries a significantly lower interest rate than loger-term borrwing

Default and no-default situations are (Nash-)equilibrium together

(suppose the money a country borrows is provided by a large group of lenders)

- the difference of these two can sometimes very small.

• Partial default and rescheduling

In practice, most defaults end up being partial, not complete, albeit sometimes after long negotiations and much acrimony.

In most cases, partial repayment is significant and not a token (to re-enter the debt market.)

A bargaining perspective helps explain why we include rescheduling in our definition of sovereign defaults.

The fact that countries sometimes default on their debt does not provide prima facie evidence that investors were irrational -- they receive risk premiums sometimes exceeding 5 or 10 perce.t per annum.

prima facie: apparently

• Odious debt

• Domestic public debt

Domestic debt is debt a country owes to itself.

Robert Barros's Ricardian model of debt says that domestic public debt does not matter at all.(?)

However, Barro's analysis presumes that debt will be always honoured.

outright defaults on domestic public debt occur far more often than one might imagine but not so often as external debt.

Stataで四半期データを認識させる方法

Stataで時系列データを分析する際は，


tsset year


というように，時間（年，月，四半期etc)を表す変数を指定する必要がある。
この変数が単なる数字であればよいが，文字列で表記されている場合には一工夫いるようだ。
（どう”一工夫”しなければならないのか，毎回忘れるという憂き目にあっている汗）

手元のデータには

qrt = [1997q1, 1997q2, 1997q3, 1997q4, 1998q1,...]

という変数が準備されている。これを認識させたい。

答えは，まずquarterlyという関数を用いて

gen time = quarterly(qrt, "Yq")

とすれば，変数timeには

time = [148, 149, 150, 151, 152,...]

という数字が格納される。
なお，quarterly()は，1960q1を0として四半期に連番を与える関数である。

あとはtimeを，時間を表す変数として認識させればよいが，四半期データとして認識させるには

tsset time, quarterly

と，quarterlyというオプションを振る必要がある。
すると

time variable:  time, 1997q4 to 2011q1
           delta: 1 quarter

と出力されて，セットされた時間のスパンとその間隔を確認することが出来る。
参考：
http://www.econ.kobe-u.ac.jp/~nomura/lecture/11f/stata.pdf のp37

Test

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