We consider a competitive bank loan market model where the marginal costs of managing and monitoring loans are assumed to increase as borrowers' net worth decreases. We show that the responsiveness of equilibrium bank loan rates to changes in interbank money market rates become weaker as...

This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy uncertainty and the term structure of interest rates. Extending the Ellingsen and Soderstrom (2001) model, we demonstrate that long-term interest rates are positively related to monetary policy uncertainty, with the magnitude...

This paper aims primarily to propose the framework for estimating the optimal levels of capital at banks with broad perspectives, elaborating factors such as liquidity and macroeconomic conditions. First, we attempt to reorganize the variety of policy proposals for enhancing financial sector...

This paper reviews the experience of US monetary policy from 2000 to shed some light on issues regarding the effectiveness of monetary policy in a low inflation era. Our analysis is twofold. First, based on a simple inflation forecast targeting model introduced in Svensson (1997) and Kato and...

This paper presents an updated estimation of the total factor productivity (TFP) of the U.S. economy following the two preceding empirical studies, Basu et al. (2001) and Burnside et al. (1995). Based on these two estimation approaches, both of which carefully handle the potential estimation...

Empirical studies report a marked dispersion in skill-premium changes across economies over the past few decades. Structural models in early studies successfully replicate the increases in skill premiums in many economies, while some other cases with a decline in the skill premium are yet to be...