The University of Tokyo · Social Sciences
Professor Hironori Kato's research lab specializes in urban and transportation economics, with a focus on the socioeconomic impacts of infrastructure investment, particularly urban railways and expressways. The lab investigates travel behavior, land use, and sustainability through advanced econometric methods such as spatial difference-in-differences, multinomial logit models, and meta-analysis. It also emphasizes sustainability education and household-level time allocation, integrating behavioral economics with urban planning and environmental policy. The lab’s work bridges empirical analysis with policy-relevant insights for metropolitan development in Asia, especially in Japan, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
This study empirically analyzes the effects of urban railway investment on regional population density, employment density, and land price using the spatial difference-in-differences (DID) approach, employing a sociodemographic and socioeconomic dataset in 2,843 zones in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area from 2000 to 2010. A spatial-lag model and a spatial-error model, in addition to an ordinary least square model under the framework of the DID approach, are employed in the empirical analyses. The res
This paper examines the association between the built environment (BE) and travel behavior in Hanoi, Vietnam. A multinomial logit model is used to analyze individuals’ choice of travel mode from a dataset collected via a questionnaire-based household travel survey in 2016 and the geospatial data of BE variables; the dataset contains 762 responses from local residents in ten districts of the Hanoi Metropolitan Area about their daily travel episodes. It also examines a spatial aggregation effect b
This paper examines the value of travel time saving (VTTS) in Japan with a meta-analysis. 216 VTTSs estimated in 68 peer-reviewed papers on travel behavior in Japan from 1979 to 2003 are used for the meta-analysis. First, the basic characteristics of VTTSs are analyzed from the viewpoints of purpose of travel, weekday/ weekend day, type of data, urban/interurban, and attribute of travel. Then, the regression analyses are conducted with all VTTS estimates, with VTTS estimates of urban travels, an
This study developed a sustainability education program that incorporated the concept of city sustainability, delivered it to local university students in the Jakarta Metropolitan Area (Jabodetabek), Indonesia, and then evaluated its effectiveness using questionnaire surveys. The educational materials consisted of a case story and scenario analysis report relating to city sustainability. The case story was a fictional narrative describing sustainability issues in Jabodetabek, in which the protag
This paper describes research on intrahousehold interactions, based on results of an activity-based time allocation model. The paper describes a joint time-allocation model that explicitly considers a child in addition to parents. It analyzes activity duration as well as activity type. This model was formulated as a nonlinear Tobit model for econometric analysis. The model parameters were estimated with data from a household time-allocation survey completed during 2003 in Toyama, Japan. Two mode
Expressways provide road users with reduced travel time and safer driving conditions for a toll. The toll charge has been one of the most important issues in expressway planning. The user's willingness to pay for saving travel time by using an expressway service is one of the most important factors in examining toll charges for expressways. A large Japanese database was used to empirically estimate road users' value of travel time savings (VTTS). The results showed that the estimated VTTS of bus
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