Has the biggest sovereign debt default in history passed without answering the urgent legal and policy questions it posed, and with barely a ripple in the global financial markets? So far, pretty much. Lawsuits have not yielded a penny for the creditors. They failed to stop the spring 2005 debt...

Recently, great attention has been focused on the impact of exchange rate regimes, just as previous empirical research examined central bank autonomy and announced targets for domestic monetary policy. To date, however, these three elements of monetary frameworks have been assessed in isolation...

The efficacy of fiscal policy in Japan in the last decade has been a subject of considerable dispute, and the coincidence of mounting deficits and continued stagnation has led some to conclude that fiscal policy was ineffective. This paper finds ample support for the opposite conclusion:...

This working paper investigates the European Monetary Unification’s (EMU) effect on wage restraint—the degree to which wage increases do or do not exceed productivity growth. We find in cross-sectional investigations that wage restraint either is unchanged or has increased following EMU in...

Short-term volatility in G3 bilateral exchange rates has been a fact of life since the beginning of the post-Bretton Woods float. It has been established, surprisingly, that this volatility is not only disproportionately large relative to the variation in relative macroeconomic fundamentals of...

The Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology gives its visitors much to ponder. Established at the site in Nagoya where in 1911 Sakichi Toyoda founded his automatic loom factory (the basis of the family fortune, which later funded his son Kiichiro’s development of automobile...

Observers have relied increasingly on simple reaction functions, such as the Taylor rule, to assess the conduct of monetary policy. Applying this approach to deflationary or near-zero inflation environments is problematic, however, and this paper examines two shortcomings of particular relevance...

Did monetary easing in the 1980s cause Japan's bubble, as is often suggested? Drawing on both a new cross-national consideration of the monetary policy-asset price linkage and a reexamination of what actually occurred in Japan during 1985-90, I conclude that the bubble was just as likely to...

This paper assesses the effects of central bank governor appointments on financial market expectations of monetary policy. To measure these effects, we assemble a new dataset of appointment announcements from 15 countries, and conduct an event study analysis on exchange rates, bond yields, and...

In the postwar era, US-Japan economic relations have been characterized by substantial tensions, yet this has not damaged the underlying security relationship or critically harmed the multilateral economic framework. In fact, these two economies have become more integrated over time even as...