Monetary Policy and the Lost Decade

This paper investigates how monetary policy can help ward off a protracted deflationary slump when policy rates are near the zero bound by studying the experience of Japan during the ""Lost Decade"" which followed the asset-price bubble collapse in the early 1990s. Estimation results based on a structural model suggest that the Bank of Japan's interest-rate policy fits a conventional forward-looking reaction function with an inflation target of about 1 percent. The disappointing economic performance thus seems primarily due to a series of adverse economic shocks rather than an extraordinary po