Even though monetary policy has kept interest rates at historically low levels, the Japanese economy has experienced long lasting recessions since the 1990s. In this paper, Japanese data are employed to conduct an empirical analysis of changes in the effects of monetary policy on the real...

Empirical studies in corporate finance have long been focused on the role of banks in reducing the costs of financial distress. The environment and events in Japan provide a "natural experiment" that allows such empirical studies. The number of bankruptcies steadily increased throughout the...

This paper analyzes the time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model for the Japanese economy and monetary policy. The time-varying parameters are estimated via the Markov chain Monte Carlo method and the posterior estimates of parameters reveal the time-varying structure of the...

Because a borrower often faces switching costs in dealing with individual banks, the financial health of any given bank might affect the borrower's cost of funds. These costs would be particularly large for firms that have close relationships with relatively few banks. The purpose of this paper...

We define downward price rigidity as the state in which the speed at which prices fall is slower than that in which they rise. Based on this definition, we examine the downward price rigidity of each item that constitutes the core CPI of Japan. That is, according to the results of fractional...

We construct Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) models optimized by the Posterior Information Criterion (PIC), in which hyper-parameters are data-determined in the same way as the lag length and trend order. We also assess the performance of the selected models by one-step ahead forecasts...

Trade credit is one of the most important sources of short-term external finance for small firms. Previous literature has focused mainly on the substitution of bank loans for trade credit during monetary tightening among many firms, but in this paper we investigate the role of trade credit...

We investigate the significance of fundamentals variables and uncertainty of appropriate models in one-, two-, four-, and eight-quarter ahead forecasts of quarterly yen-dollar real exchange rates by using 16 fundamentals-based models and the random walk model. Our empirical results show...

This paper examines the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis of the yen-dollar exchange market by taking into account the following four points: accumulated current accounts as an additional variable, more powerful tests of Horvath and Watson(1995), more appropriate critical values through...

We empirically analyze the effects of uncertainty on investment, by types of uncertainty and by properties of stochastic processes; that is, permanent and transitory components separated from economic variables. According to our results, based on Japanese economic data, we find significant...