In urban sociology, various studies have been conducted on urban ways of life. In particular, the subcultural theory of urbanism which is presented by C.S. Fischer has been receiving increasing attention. In this paper, I discuss (1) applicability of subcultural theory of urbanism in Japan, (2) possibility of future development of subcultural theory of urbanism, and (3) importance of increasing the likelihood that theories are tested.

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     Epidemiology aims to understand the patterns and determinants of health and diseases in a population. Social epidemiology, a branch of epidemiology that addresses the social determinants of health, including poverty, social stratification, and income inequality, has investigated socioeconomic disparities in health in global and domestic settings and has contributed to governmental policies in health and other areas. Although social sciences explore the association between societal factors and health, their analytical approaches are sometimes different from those of epidemiology, in part because epidemiology, a “tool” of public health, is basically a practical science. Another reason may be the complexity in biological and social etiology. Nevertheless, studies on the association between society and health should be a collaborative effort between epidemiologists or medical scientists and social scientists.

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     This paper surveys several important researches which focus on 'health' from an economic standpoint and evaluates their academic contribution with a focus on recent studies.In the typical analyses of health research in Economics, health is regarded as a part of human capital enhancing people's productivity and the impacts on labor productivity or national growth are examined. Human capital theory by Gary, Becker and Michael Grossman have been prompting many empirical researches which examine the relationships between people's health and their productivity.Nevertheless, the health studies have been increasingly diverse, and interestingly, several researchers have begun to focus on the role of regional and companies' factors for health status in addition to people's socio-economic status. Furthermore, in the field of Health Economics, the methods of economic valuation such as cost-benefit analysis and cost-utility analysis are utilized for evaluating the social security systems like public health insurance system and medical services.Currently, several fields of researchers are actively conducting collaborative researches to deal with more sophisticated and specialized health research issues. It is expected that the integration of various fields of academic studies is prompted in order to analyze the determinants of health and to get a better grasp regarding the multiple effects.

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     Two models have been proposed to explain the effects of social relationships on health: One describes the direct effects, and the other, stress-buffering effects. In each model, social relationships function as mediators in the association between socioeconomic status and health, and separately as modulators of socioeconomic status on health. This article attempts to propose the roles of social relationships to account for research on socioeconomic diversity of health. The article is divided into three sections: (1) A brief review of research on socioeconomic status and social relationships as social determinants of health, and a description of the roles of social relationship indicators in the research on socioeconomic status, as a social determinant of health, (2) The current states of researches on these roles, and (3) Proposals for future research on the role of social relationship indicators.

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     This paper aims to reveal the assumptions of the fixed effect model, which is widely used for analyzing panel data, and develop an alternate model that is able to distinguish the patterns of changes in independent variables. Although the fixed effect model cannot distinguish the direction and path of changes and the status of unchanges in independent variables mainly because it neglects the sequential order of panel data, in the real world, these elements in changes and unchanges may have unique effects on a dependent variable. By applying original parameterization to the first difference model, the author attempts to relax the assumptions of the fixed effect model and develop a model that can capture the unique effects of these elements on the premise that changes in independent variables directly cause changes in a dependent variable. The author uses this model to analyze income changes that follow changes in employment status, and theoretically investigates in what situations one should relax the assumptions of the fixed effect model and distinguish the direction and path of changes and the status of unchanges in independent variables.

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     A number of tracking studies have revealed that inequities in schools' structures and practices perpetuate societal inequities by negatively affecting the quality of education experienced by certain groups of students. However, how the structure of the school system influences students' behavior has not been well studied. To investigate whether the tracking structure shapes high school students' self-learning hours, a multilevel ordinal regression analysis was carried out with a nationally representative Japanese dataset from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Findings of this study show that one's tracking location represented as school rank, school socioeconomic composition and curriculum tracking (general/vocational education) shape how long students study mathematics by themselves. Also, all student-level variables including students' socioeconomic status and academic disposition affect their practice of self-studying, while other variables are held constant. These results highlight the importance of understanding how one's effort is structured not only by students' background but also by the school system; how the formal education is organized facilitates socioeconomically advantaged students to study longer by themselves outside of any instructional lessons, intensifying the inequality of effort.

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     The game theoretical model in this article formulates the effect of communication in social dilemma situations. Many psychological experiments and field studies indicate that social dilemmas are often resolved when the members are able to communicate each other. In order to understand this mechanism, we refined equilibria in infinitely iterated N-person prisoner's dilemma (INPD) game. Because many Pareto-deficient sub-game perfect Nash equilibria exist in the game, we exclude Nash equilibria which are dominated by single-period coalitional deviation. The equilibrium concept is closely related to Strong Perfect Equilibrium, which is invented by Rubinstein (1980).From this analysis, I revealed that almost all sub-game perfect Nash equilibria in which many players defect in more than one stage are dominated by coalitional deviation. Moreover, the model shows two interesting implications. Firstly, both communications and long-term relationships are needed to achieve cooperation in social dilemmas because those have different functions. Secondly, under some conditions, cooperative outcomes are obtained only if players can collude without any inhibition.

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     This article examines theoretically how production markets vary with their social bases; i.e., institutional, relational, and cultural contexts that construct and surround the markets. Different social contexts engender various behavioral types of market actors. Market actors display global equalization behavior as well as local optimization behavior. Producers equalize globally when they watch all other producers and hold an identical revenue to the cost ratio. They optimize locally when they solely optimize production volume on their own cost function. Consumers equalize globally when they demand all producers to provide an identical satisfaction to the expenditure ratio. They optimize locally when they demand each producer to optimize locally for consumers' satisfaction given the expenditure. Based on the diverse behavior types of market actors, four different market types are identified. This article shows that market performances are different in diverse market types. The finding shows that institutional, relational, and cultural contexts shape and construct markets as social bases.

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