A veteran finance minister, Takahashi Korekiyo, brought an early recovery for Japan from the Great Depression of the 1930s by prescribing a combination of expansionary fiscal, exchange rate, and monetary policies. To explore the comprehensive transmission mechanism of Takahashi's macroeconomic...

Japan defaulted on its public debts only once throughout its modern history, after World War II (WWII). How did Japan lose its ability to sustain its public debts? This paper explores the sustainability of public debts in Japan before and during WWII. First, this paper reviews the brief history...

Departing from the gold standard was the necessary condition for early recovery from the Great Depression in 1930s (Eichengreen and Sachs[1985]). Then, was it the sufficient condition for an independent monetary policy? I explore Japan's monetary policy during the interwar period, focusing on...

Temin [1989] and Eichengreen [1992] argue that monetary policy played a key role in each country's economic performance during the Great Depression, and that some European policymakers hesitated to pursue an expansionary monetary policy even after departing from gold. Why did these policymakers...

Why did policymakers adopt the gold standard? Although previous research has identified ex post effects of gold standard adoption on trade and bond yields, few studies have sought to understand whether these were the actual outcomes of interest to policymakers at the time of adoption. We examine...

This paper studies the determinants of size differentials between fiscal multipliers in countries around the world, both advanced and developing economies. Besides domestic conditions and exchange rate regimes, we also introduce variables not before considered for explaining multiplier size...

This paper provides a historical case study in pre-modern era which shows that financial market stability is a necessary condition for an effective macroeconomic policy. We explore the implications on the rice market interventions as a tool of the macroeconomic policy in Japan's early 19th...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of unonventional monetary policy on the macro ecnomy. It focuses on the Japanese economy during the Bank of Japan's quantitative easing policy period, and analyzes the effects of monetary policy shocks and systematic monetary policy using the vector...