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The purpose of this paper is to examine how gender equality influences difference in cognitive skills between genders. For the closer examination of Guiso et al. (2008), restricting the sample to immigrants allows us to reduce the possibility of reverse causality.

Using PISA 2012 matched with the gender wage gap sourced from World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Index 2011, the author compares the effect of the wage gap among the areas of mathematics, science and reading.

Decreased gender wage gap leads to girls exhibiting a reduced incidence of lateness and skipping school compared with boys, which in turn improves girls’ test scores in mathematics, science and reading. The direct effect of the decreased wage gap on test scores exceeds its indirect effect on performance owing to influencing school attendance.

The findings of this paper provide evidence that higher female wage level relative to male wage level incentivizes female students to attend school, resulting in their achieving higher test scores not only for mathematics, but also for science and reading.

This paper aims to investigate whether natural disasters enhance efficiency improvement, capital accumulation and technological progress. Further, this paper examines whether the influence of naturals disasters depends on the legal origin.

For this purpose, by using long-term panel data, this paper decomposes productivity growth measured by the growth of output per labor unit into three components of efficiency improvement, capital accumulation and technological progress.

After controlling for countries' specific unobservable characteristics and year-specific effects, the paper found that impacts of natural disasters vary according to specification. However, the natural disasters enhance capital accumulation and technological progress for non-French legal origin countries, while the disasters have no effect on them for French legal origin countries.

The role played by natural disasters on capital accumulation and Schumpeterian creative destruction depends on historical institutional conditions. Hence, it is important to consider the interaction between exogenous shock and institutions when examining economic growth.

Japan's 2011 natural disasters were accompanied by a devastating nuclear disaster in Fukushima. This paper used cross-country data obtained immediately after the Japanese disaster to explore how, and the extent to which, corruption affects the perception of citizens regarding the risk of nuclear accidents. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Endogeneity bias was controlled for using instrumental variables when the author conducted regression estimation.

The cross-country analysis showed that citizens in less corrupt countries tend to perceive there to be a lower possibility of nuclear accident.

The finding made it evident that transparency of government enables citizens to access accurate information, reducing information asymmetry between citizens and government.

There is controversy between Putnam and Olson concerning the role of groups. Putnam argued that small groups contribute to economic growth, whereas Olson asserted that small groups hamper economic growth through rent‐seeking behavior. Since the end of the 1990s in Japan, there has been a remarkable rise in the rate of enactment of public information‐disclosure ordinances by local governments. This paper aims to use the panel data of Japan to compare the effects of Putnam‐type horizontally structured groups and Olson‐type vertically structured groups on government information disclosures.

The Arellano‐Bond type dynamic panel model is employed to control for unobserved fixed effects and endogeneity bias.

The major findings are as follows: the Putnam‐type group has a positive influence on information disclosure; and the Olson‐type group has a detrimental effect on information disclosure.

These findings support both the Putnam and Olson hypotheses. The characteristics of a particular group should be considered carefully when the influence of that group is examined.