Since August 1995, Japanese banks have had to pay a premium on Eurodollar and Euroyen interbank loans relative to their U.S. and U.K. competitors. This so-called Japan premium' provides a market indicator of investor anxiety about the ability of Japanese banks to repay loans. We examine the...

This study examines the misallocation of credit in Japan associated with the perverse incentives of banks to provide additional credit to the weakest firms. Firms are far more likely to receive additional credit if they are in poor financial condition, and these firms continue to perform poorly...

The relative wealth hypothesis of Froot and Stein (1991), motivated by the aggregate correlation between real exchange rates and foreign direct investment (FDI) observed in the 1980s, cannot explain one of the major shifts in FDI in the 1990s: the continued decline in Japanese FDI during a...

The 'credit channel' theory of monetary policy transmission holds that informational frictions in credit markets worsen during tight- money periods. The resulting increase in the external finance premium--the difference in cost between internal and external funds-- enhances the effects of...

Extending the approach of Bernanke and Blinder (1992), Strongin (1992), and Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (1994a, 1994b), we develop and apply a VAR-based methodology for measuring the stance of monetary policy. More specifically, we develop a 'semi-structural' VAR approach, which extracts...

First, we show that the interest rate on Federal funds is extremely informative about future movements of real macroeconomic variables, more so than monetary aggregates or other interest rates. Next, we argue that the reason for this forecasting is that the funds rate sensitively records shocks...

A number of interest rates and interest rate spreads have been found to be useful in prediction the course of the economy. We compare the predictive power of some of these suggested interest rate variables for nine indicators of real activity and the inflation rate. Our results are consistent...

Bad economic times are typically associated with a high incidence of financial distress, e.g., insolvency and bankruptcy. This paper studies the role of changes in borrower solvency in the initiation and propagation of the business cycle. We first develop a model of the process of financing real...

Structural vector autoregressions (VARs) are widely used to trace out the effect of monetary policy innovations on the economy. However, the sparse information sets typically used in these empirical models lead to at least two potential problems with the results. First, to the extent that...

Standard models of aggregate demand treat money and credit asymmetrically; money is given a special status, while loans, bonds, and other debt instruments are lumped together in a "bond market" and suppressed by Walras' Law. This makes bank liabilities central to the monetary transmission...