In Japan, the inflation rate declined to near-zero, whereas the monetary policy faced a zero lower bound (ZLB) in the 1990s. We examine whether trend inflation had fallen to near-zero prior to the ZLB. To achieve this, we estimate Japanese pre-2000 trend inflation developing a Markov-switching...

This study provides an explanation for the emergence of power laws in asset trading volume and returns. We consider a two-state model with binary actions, where traders infer other traders' private signals regarding the value of an asset from their actions and adjust their own behavior...