This is the first paper to directly measure and decompose total factor productivity growth (TFPG) for the Canadian life insurance industry. TFPG averaged 1.0 percent per year over the period from 1979 to 1989, thereby outperforming many manufacturing industries. The rate of TFPG was 0.2 percent...

Japanese monetary and fiscal policy uses the consumer price index as a metric for price stability. Despite a major effort to improve the index, the Japanese methodology of calculating the CPI seems to have a large number of deficiencies. Little attention is paid in Japan to substitution biases...

The theoretical debate over whether countries can and should set tariffs in response to the foreign export elasticities they face goes back to Edgeworth (1894). Despite the centrality of the optimal tariff argument in trade policy, there exists no evidence about whether countries actually...

We show that supply-side financial shocks have a large impact on firms’ investment. We do this by developing a new methodology to separate firm credit shocks from loan supply shocks using a vast sample of matched bank-firm lending data. We decompose loan movements in Japan for the period 1990...