Asia and China made disproportionate contributions to the slowdown of global trade growth in 2015. China's import growth slowed starkly, driven by both external and domestic factors, including a rebalancing of demand. Econometric results point to weak investment and rebalancing as the main...

Superficial examination of aggregate gross cross-border capital inflow data suggests that there was no substitution between portfolio inflows and bank loans in recent years. However, our novel analysis of disaggregate inflows (both by types of instrument and borrower) shows interesting...

This paper evaluates the informativeness of eight micro pricing moments for monetary non-neutrality. Frequency of price changes is the only robustly informative moment. The ratio of kurtosis over frequency is significant only because of frequency, and insignificant when non-pricing moments are...

In this paper, we investigate how negative interest rate policy (NIRP) introduced by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) affected Japanese banks' lending and risk-taking behavior. The BoJ's unexpected announcement was unequivocally viewed as an accommodative surprise in financial markets, but equity prices...

Singapore is one of the world's most open economies, with the size of its trade reaching about 350 percent of its GDP. With the rise of highly diversified cross-border production networks, Singapore has come to play an integral role in the global supply chain with heavy reliance on foreign...

Cross-sectional variation in micro data can be used to empirically evaluate sufficient statistics for the response of aggregate variables to policy shocks of interest. We demonstrate an easy-to-use approach through a detailed example. We evaluate the sufficiency of micro pricing moments for the...

Asian countries have high demand for U.S. dollars and are sensitive to U.S. dollar funding costs. An important, but often overlooked, component of these costs is the basis spread in the cross-currency swap market that emerges when there are deviations from covered interest parity (CIP). CIP...

Productivity growth in Japan, as in most advanced economies, has moderated. This paper finds supportive evidence for the important role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in explaining Japan's modest productivity growth. Results show a substantial dispersion in firm-level productivity...

The Bank of Japan has introduced various unconventional monetary policy tools since the launch of Abenomics in 2013, to achieve the price stability target of 2 percent inflation. In this paper, a forward-looking open-economy general equilibrium model with endogenously determined policy...