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Paper short abstract

Based on previous research on employer-provided housing in Japan, this paper shifts focus from its re-emergence to its stabilization. Using recent quantitative indicators, it analyzes how new housing providers govern labor mobility beyond conventional rental market institutions.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the resurgence of employer-provided housing in Japan as an institutional device that mediates between labor market demands and housing market constraints. Building on earlier heuristic research on how worker mobility has been enabled despite rigid rental market institutions, the paper shifts the analytical focus from the emergence of such arrangements to their consolidation and normalization over the past two decades.

Rather than treating employer housing as a residual form of corporate welfare, the paper conceptualizes it as a form of housing infrastructure that actively governs labor mobility. It argues that recent transformations in Japan’s political economy—characterized by labor market flexibilization, demographic change, and the partial withdrawal of firms from long-term employment commitments—have generated demand for housing arrangements that decouple residence from stable tenancy. In this context, new types of housing providers and intermediary firms have emerged that reorganize access to housing through short-term use rights, bundled services, and corporate leasing models.

Empirically, the paper combines qualitative insights from prior expert interviews with newly available quantitative data on rent levels, dwelling size, usage rates, and regional distribution of employer-provided housing. These data are not used to establish causal relationships, but to support a structural reading of shifts in the function and positioning of employer housing within the broader housing system. The analysis identifies distinct usage patterns that point to selective forms of mobility facilitation, privileging certain worker profiles while constraining others.

By situating employer-provided housing at the intersection of labor market governance and housing market restructuring, the paper contributes to debates in political economy and economic sociology on how markets are actively shaped through organizational and institutional interventions. While empirically grounded in the Japanese case, the paper suggests that these developments anticipate broader international trends in the reconfiguration of housing, labor mobility, and corporate responsibility.