The Transmission of Aggregate Supply and Aggregate Demand Shocks in Japan: Has There Been a Structural Change?

Despite expansionary fiscal and monetary policies, the Japanese real economy has been stagnating since the bubble bursting in the early nineties. Within a multivariate setup, this paper proposes to test for and date a possible structural shift in the response of Japanese macroeconomic fluctuations to aggregate supply and aggregate demand shocks. The econometric methodology directly derives from Andrews (1993) and Bai, Lumsdaine and Stock (1998) theoretical results. Our empirical study from monthly post-1980 observations reveals i) a significant structural break in the end of 1991, and ii) a sharp decrease in the influence of demand shocks on Japanese output fluctuations after this date.