The purpose of this paper is to analyze the branching patterns of deposit financial institutions in the Shinetsu region (Niigata and Nagano Prefectures) for comparison. Financial industries are divided into four groups: post office, private A (city bank, regional bank, trust bank and etc), private B (credit bank, credit union, labor bank), private C (Japan Agricultural and Fisheries Cooperatives). I find that post office takes into consideration the principle of 'providing their service widely and equally'. Japan Agricultural and Fisheries Cooperatives are taking the similar branching patterns to post office. On the other hand, generally speaking, the branching patterns of private financial institutions excluding Japan Agricultural and Fisheries Cooperatives are based upon the profit principle. As for the competitions of branches, no competition is found between post office and private sector in Nagano Prefecture. Post office is analyzed to compete with private A in terms of branching patterns in Niigata Prefecture. This competition is considered to be observed not because of financial service but because of postal service provided by post office. These results show that post office is not an obstacle to private financial institutions in terms of branching patterns.

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This paper analyzes informative but imperfect bank ex ante credit screening, based on the model of Stiglitz and Weiss (1981, AER). This model showed that credit rationing arises as an equilibrium phenomenon when asymmetric information between lenders and borrowers exists, and we consider this a case of bank lending without screening. Credit screening enables the bank to imperfectly distinguish types of borrowers. Under the assumption that investment returns are risky in the sense of mean preserving spreads, if a bank could set the loan interest rate equal to the borrowers' credit risk, it would achieve higher profits through credit screening. However, the total amount of lending decreases because of the imperfectness of screening, which is caused by driving types of low risk out of the bank lending market. Thus, we regard this as a social cost. It is also evinced that unlike collateral, an application fee, which borrowers pay before bank screening, cannot function as a self-selection mechanism of borrower types.

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During 1990's, the New Zealanders had a hard time due to poorer public health services. Market-oriented policy in public health sector induced serious health inequalities, so health outcomes of Maori, Pacific islanders and most deprived people had been worse through the period than rest of the people. When the Labour Party came into power in December 1999, the government abolished market-oriented health system. They set out "the Primary Health Care Strategy" in 2001, and then implemented a set of primary health care reform in order to reduce health inequalities among people through subsidy policies lowering co-payment, collaboration within health sector and offering community and people focused services. They reconstructed pubic health sector to establish 21 District Health Boards (DHBs). DHBs work through Primary Health Organisations (PHOs), non-profit local structures comprising primary health care practitioners like general practitioners, to achieve the strategy goals. The government encourages people to enroll PHO in their communities with aims at recovering, maintaining and improving people's health. The funding system was also changed into capitation based funding from fee-for-service funding formula, and it is offering different ranges of subsidies to enrolled people. The health reform in New Zealand is now proceeding through universal primary health care services and it provides plenty of suggestions with the primary health care system in Japan.

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The population density function, a relationship between population density and distance from the center of the city, has been used to describe the spatial distribution of urban population. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the specification of this function. The Box-Cox transformation appears to be useful in making specification flexible. A survey of the previous papers reveals that this transformation has been applied to density, the dependent variable. An empirical investigation of a Japanese city shows the usefulness of transforming distance, the independent variable, as well as density.

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In this study we investigated what types of credit association are more likely to seek credit ratings. Specifically, we examined whether the credit rating acquisitions of credit associations are promoted by a competitive prefectural environment, by the amounts of bad loans or by the amounts of deposit balances. Our study demonstrated that credit associations that were located in more competitive markets or that had large deposit balances were more likely to disclose credit ratings. We also found that credit associations that were experiencing serious bad loan problems were less likely to choose to voluntarily disclose this information.

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In a signaling theory, learning ability and productivity are often considered to be similar and a clear difference between them is not assumed. This paper shows that an assumption of the difference between them makes it clear that a correlation between them is important for one's educational background to signalize one's ability. This paper also discusses the problems associated with liquidity constraints when students signalize one's own ability.

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Corporations are said to be social entities, and CSR concept is prevailing these days. On the other hand, to revitalize stagnated communities, social capital is expected to play a leading role to pull all assets and resources to support the area. From this point of view, as key actors of social network, local corporations' social function is of great value to contribute to solve social problems.

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The bottlenecks of the global economy are revealed recently such as demerits of competition or economic differentials. As economic competitions lead to the efficient allocation and do not realize equity or justice of economy, new approaches are needed to resolve these problems. For example, behavioral economics and neuro-economics are useful in this context. 95 years ago,Schumpeter,J. pointed out that innovations are needed to accomplish economic developments in The Theory of Economic Development[1912]. According to Schumpeter theory, value creating or innovative companies and households accomplish the new value creating or innovative society. While intellectual assets or intellectual capital are new idea of innovative companies, noblesse-oblige seeking households are new players of innovative society. While traditional economics is constructed on the assumption of homo-economicus,new approaches are behavioral economics and neuro-economics that homo-economicus is not necessary condition and idea of non homo-economicus is key cincept to understand the new value creating or innovative society.

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