Using secondary market data on corporate bonds issued in Japan between 1997 and 2005, this paper explores the determinants of the credit spread of corporate bond rates over interest swap rates. We find that credit spreads properly reflect financial factors at the firm level, including...

Using Japanese money market data, this paper compares the predictive ability of the log-log specification with infinite elasticity at a zero interest rate and the semilog specification with a one time switch from moderate to relatively high semielasticity at annual interest rates less than 0.5%....

Based on a standard model of money demand, this paper first shows that a relationship between money supply and prices may be substantially weakened when money demand is highly interest-elastic, and then presents empirical evidence for this implication using the Japanese money market data for the...