We use a VAR with block exogeneity to study the effects of oil price fluctuations on the economies of six ASEAN countries. Our method has an advantage over those used in the literature in that it allows us to focus on the effects of oil shocks while avoiding making unnecessary, and often ad hoc...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic policies--dubbed Abenomics--have been successful on some but not all fronts. The Japanese government must still pursue policies to increase economic growth. This PIIE Briefing, released on the heels of Prime Minister Abe's election victory in December, calls...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic policies--dubbed Abenomics--have been successful on some but not all fronts. The Japanese government must still pursue policies to increase economic growth. This PIIE Briefing, released on the heels of Prime Minister Abe's election victory in December, calls...

As Japanese firms have reduced the proportion of debts in their capital structures, they have also increased their debt maturities. Since the shorter debt maturity is more costly for the firms of poor performance, it is argued that the maturity length plays the role of signal as the theoretical...

This note provides an overview of macroeconomic problems that the Japanese economy faces after the global financial crisis and discusses Japan's policy responses, emphasizing the comparison with the United States and European countries.

Using the data from the Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations by Industry (FSSCI), we examine whether the decrease of corporate debt subsequent to the banking crisis in the late 1990s improved the efficiency of factor allocation at the microeconomic level. While the cross-sectoral...

The first contribution of this paper, in following the works of Lettau and Ludvigson (2001a,b), is to construct a Japanese consumption–wealth ratio data series and to examine whether it explains Japanese stock market data. We find that the consumption–wealth ratio does predict future stock...

This paper examines the behavior of stock and land prices during the bubble economy of the second half of the 1980s, paying considerable attention to the linkage of the two markets and the effects of monetary policy.In particular, we first examine whether the boom in asset prices can be...