The onset of financial instability in August 2007, which quickly spread across the world, raises a number of questions for policy makers. First, what are the roots of the crisis? Many factors have been emphasized in the debate, including the opacity of complex financial products; the excessive...

We test the menu cost model of Ball and Mankiw (1994, 1995), which implies that the impact of price dispersion on inflation should differ between inflation and deflation episodes, using data for Japan and Hong Kong. We use a random cross-section sample split when calculating the moments of the...

Recently, the Bank of Japan outlined a "two perspectives" approach to the conduct of monetary policy that focuses on risks to price stability over different time horizons. Interpreting this as pertaining to different frequency bands, we use band spectrum regression to study the determination of...