 Getting student loans right in Japan: problems and possible solutionsLorraine Dearden () and Nobuko Nagase No 668, Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Abstract: In this paper we take a detailed look at the Japanese university graduate labor market to understand more fully the problems with the current Japanese student loan system identified in Kobayashi and Armstrong (2017). We see that unlike most other countries with a large proportion of female university graduates, Japanese female graduates earn significantly less than male university graduates and this appears to be driven by significant wage falls when female graduates marry or have their first child. This means that understanding the repayment burden problems of the current student loan system and designing alternative income contingent loan systems needs to take into account the household income of graduates. We show that an affordable income contingent loan (ICL) system could be introduced in Japan, however the repayments would probably have to be based on household income. We illustrate this with a couple of example ICLs and highlight further work that needs to be done to come up with a feasible and fair student loan system in Japan for post high school education. Keywords: Student loans; student loan design; Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hit:hituec:668 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.