Social Involution: Reproducibility Materials

This repository contains the data-processing materials, reconstructed analytical datasets, computational code, and numerical outputs supporting the manuscript submitted to the Journal of Social Policy on the welfare consequences of the contraction of Japan’s Category III public pension coverage.

The study examines pension reform not only as a change in individual pension entitlement but also as a redistribution of welfare costs across households, generations, and local communities. Particular attention is given to individuals remaining in Category III coverage, including the socioeconomic, employment, income, and caregiving characteristics of persons aged 55–59, who are likely to be particularly relevant to the transitional effects of reform.

The analytical framework evaluates welfare losses arising when reductions in pension-related protection are transferred to unpaid family support, informal caregiving, foregone employment or educational opportunities, and community-based assistance. This approach extends conventional incidence analysis by treating these family- and community-level responses as real social resource consumption rather than costless private adjustments.

The repository includes materials used for reconstruction of the relevant population and policy scenarios, calculation of the principal welfare-loss measures, sensitivity and robustness analyses, and tables and numerical results reported in the manuscript and Supplementary Material. Where the original source data are publicly available government statistics, the repository documents the sources and processing procedures required to reproduce the analytical dataset rather than redistributing restricted or non-redistributable source files.

The archive is intended to provide a transparent and reproducible record of the computational analysis underlying the manuscript. It may also facilitate future extensions examining the distributional effects of pension reform across age groups, household structures, employment status, caregiving responsibilities, and intergenerational transfers.

Contents of the archive include:

• data-source documentation and data-processing notes;

• reconstructed analytical datasets used in the study;

• scripts and computational procedures for the principal analyses;

• welfare-loss and policy-scenario calculations;

• robustness and sensitivity-analysis outputs;

• tables and intermediate numerical results supporting the manuscript and Supplementary Material;

• documentation describing the structure of the replication package.

The repository should be cited together with the associated article when the data-processing procedures, reconstructed datasets, computational methods, or numerical results are reused.

Associated manuscript: Submitted to Journal of Social Policy.

Research fields: social policy; public pensions; social insurance; welfare economics; household welfare; unpaid care; intergenerational transfers; Japan.