Labor Market Responses to Legal Work Hour Reduction: Evidence from Japan 1 Daiji Kawaguchi 2 and Hisahiro Naito 3 and Izumi Yokoyama 4 December 27, 2008 1 This paper is a part of the research program by the Economic Social Research Institute (ESRI) of the Cabinet Office. Special permission was granted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to use micro data from the Basic Survey of Wage Structure. We thank Yuko Ueno of the Cabinet Office for her assistance in the data application process. Statistical analysis based on the Basic Survey of Wage Structure was exclusively implemented by Daiji Kawaguchi and Hisahiro Naito. We appreciate the comments from Hidehiko Ichimura, Sachiko Kuroda, Ryo Nakajima, Isao Yamamoto, and seminar participants at the ESRI of the Cabinet Office, the RIETI labor study group, the RIETI labor law and economics group, the OEIO conference at the University of Tokyo, and the 2008 Asian Conference on Applied Micro-Economics/Econometrics. 2 Faculty of Economics, Hitotsubashi University. 3 Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Tsukuba. 4 Department of Economics, The University of Michigan.