Are international borders barriers to capital flows? We use evidence on net capital flows among regions within a country as a benchmark. For this purpose we develop a data set of saving and investment rates of Japanese prefectures. We find that the correlation between saving and investment rates...

Interactions between monetary and fiscal policy depend on the specification of policy variables that fiscal policy uses. However, a general rule is that when monetary policy is capable of dealing with sticky price adjustment, a primary concern of fiscal authority should be to remedy the resource...

This paper reappraises Tachibanaki and Yokoyama (2008) -an empirical analysis that indicates no apparent backward shifting of employer social insurance contributions- by modifying their empirical strategy. First, we attempt to control for a spurious positive correlation between wages and...

This paper discusses the adequacy of the activities of the Fiscal Investment Loan Program agencies after the fundamental reform in April 2001, which disconnected postal savings and public pension reserves from the FILP. It is found that many ideas of justifying the government interventions to...

As the Japanese population structure changes, health care and long-term care costs will steadily increase. The current style of financing (pay-as-you-go) will create a large increase in future burden of these costs. This paper studies an alternative policy that prefunds the social insurance...

This paper discusses how capital income taxation affects economic growth and welfare in an endogenously growing world economy with perfect capital mobility and worldwide externalities. Worldwide ex-ternalities provide a mechanism for equalizing national growth rates even with different capital...

This paper provides a theoretical overview of monetary and fiscal policy with the potential to engineer an exit from a deflationary trap, which we define here as sustained deflation in the presence of zero interest rates. We find that the required policy steps are an interest rate hike, a...