When the baby boomers joined the workforce and started saving, money supply and property prices entered a rising trajectory. We conclude that demography was the long-run driver of this process, basing our argument on data from 22 advanced economies for the 1950-2010 period. According to our life...

Japan has experienced turbulent behavior of land prices after World War II, especially after 1985. This paper first examines the explanatory power of a simple present-value model and shows its limitation. We then investigate two additional (not mutually exclusive) factors affecting the Japanese...

This paper formulates a dynamic altruistic model of parental choice of school quality and intergenerational social mobility. It shows that when there are many school qualities, the earnings of children as a function of parental schooling investment is a non-concave function, which leads to...

In the wake of recent pronounced cycles in housing, substantial media and professional debate have focused on house price determination, and in particular, optimal seller pricing strategies. In this paper, we adopt a multistage search model, in which the home seller's reservation price is...

Productivity convergence among countries has been investigated extensively with mixed results. This paper extends the analysis to the firm level to shed light on the debate of convergence or non-convergence. We find productivity convergence among firms widely in Japan, in both manufacturing...

We study the underlying structure of the two-dimensional dynamical system generated by a class of dynamic optimization models that allow for intertemporal complementarity between adjacent periods, but preserve the time-additively separable framework of Ramsey models. Specifically, we identify...