This paper claims that a scarcity of profitable private investment opportunities starting in the early 1990s or even earlier is a fundamental cause of Japan's prolonged economic stagnation during the 1990s and early 2000s. It presents evidence that the economy has been largely at a private...

This paper has three parts. First, we compile a new industry-by-industry data set of the Japanese economy in which information and communication technology (ICT) stocks are explicitly estimated and labor inputs are disaggregated with respect to age and education. Second, we investigate the...

When the Bank of Japan ended its Quantitative Easing Policy on 9 March 2006, it also issued a document entitled "The Introduction of a New Framework for the Conduct of Monetary Policy" to explain its policy stance. "Fundamental uncertainty" (the existence of "unknown unknowns") is the most...

This paper first explains why the financial crisis of 2007-08 started in the United States, in particular, in the sub-prime mortgage market, a periphery of their financial markets. Agency problems in complex securitization and investors' "responsibility avoidance" behavior are argued to be key...