From an international perspective, the European rate of unemployment has been relatively high and growing over the last one to two decades; on this background, the parallel rise in profit shares in a number of European countries seems to be at odds with expected economic behavior. The paper...

From an international perspective, the European rate of unemployment has been high and growing over the last one to two decades; against this background, the parallel rise in profit shares in a number of European countries seems to be at odds with expected economic behaviour. This paper...

The objectives of this paper are to determine the extent to which various factors contributed to the current recession in Japan and to assess whether the recent behavior of the Japanese economy differs from that in previous recessions. Toward that end, we develop a small, structural...

In this paper, we examine the role of "financial factors" in Japan and attempt to gauge their recent impact on the Japanese economy. First, we find that proxies for financial factors enter significantly in behavioral equations for loan standards, loan demand and aggregate demand, although these...

This paper examines Japan's experience in the first half of the 1990s to shed some light on several issues that arise as inflation declines toward zero. Is it possible to recognize when an economy is moving into a phase of sustained deflation? How quickly should monetary policy respond to sharp...