In the conduct of monetary policy, there exists a risk-return tradeoff between financial conditions and financial stability, which complements the traditional inflation-real activity tradeoff of monetary policy. The tradeoff exists even if monetary policy does not target financial stability...

An important difficulty in many models of behavioral economics is that preferences are endogenous and unstable. Therefore, preferences may not provide the most desirable yardstick to evaluate social states. This paper proposes unconditional love as a candidate for such a yardstick. The concept...

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis and subsequent recession, slow recoveries have been observed and slowdowns in total factor productivity (TFP) growth have been measured in many economies. This paper develops a model that can describe a slow recovery resulting from an adverse...

The paper assesses how close Asian countries are to an Optimal Currency Area in terms of business cycle synchronization, with a focus on supply shock asymmetry. Based on a Structural VAR model, the importance of symmetric and asymmetric supply shocks is teasted for all ASEAN+3 countries. In...

We empirically investigate the relationship between the Japanese general collateral (GC) repurchase agreement (repo) and uncollateralized call rates before, during, and emerging from the recent financial crisis. Unlike the US and many other countries, the Japanese GC repo rate has been higher...

As China's economic integration with the global economy deepens, the amount of capital flow to/from China has been increasing significantly, especially since it joined the WTO. In spite of such environment, the recent global financial crisis has not severely affected the Chinese financial...

Japan has the highest debt to GDP ratio among the developed nations. In addition, the population is projected to age rapidly over the next few decades, which will significantly increase the ratio of government expenditures to GDP. In this paper, we explore the effect of economic growth driven by...

This paper investigates how the market valuation of credit risk changed during 2008-2009 via a separation of the probability of default (PD) and the loss given default (LGD) of credit default swaps ( CDSs), using the information implied by equity options. While the Lehman Brothers collapse in...

This paper develops a framework to estimate the probability of default (PD) implied in listed stock options. The underlying option pricing model measures PD as the intensity of a jump diffusion process, in which the underlying stock price jumps to zero at default. We adopt a two-stage...

Using Japanese household survey data from 2007 to 2010, we examine how household age, income, financial assets, and education affect the tendency to participate in the stock market. Our analysis suggests that the probability of stock market participation correlates weakly with age, holding...