Recent empirical literature suggests that the degree of nominal rigidities varies over monetary policy regimes. This implies that monetary policy analysis with exogenously given nominal rigidities is subject to the Lucas critique. In a Calvo-style sticky price model, we endogenize nominal...

Even though monetary policy has kept interest rates at historically low levels, the Japanese economy has experienced long lasting recessions since the 1990s. These recessions are commonly attributed to nominal interest rates coming up against the zero bound and to the delay in achieving...

We estimate a medium-scale DSGE model of the Japanese economy following Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (2005), Smets and Wouters (2003) and Levin et al. (2005). By using actual capital utilization data and modifying the formulation of utilization following Greenwood, Hercowitz and Huffmann...

In the standard new Keynesian models, the optimal inflation rate is zero while the long-run inflation rate is non-zero positive in many countries. In this paper, we provide a new rationale for the non-zero trend inflation by utilizing the productivity gap between the intermediate-goods sector...

We present an empirical analysis on the New Keynesian Wage Phillips Curve (NKWPC) as derived by Gali (2011) using data for Japan and the US. NKWPC provides some theoretical insights on the relationship between wage inflation and the unemployment rate. We find that the empirical performance of...

The empirical study of technology shocks is intensively conducted to evaluate plausibility of the technology-driven real business cycle hypothesis. A popular method is to identify technology shocks by the long-run restriction that those solely have permanent effects on labor productivity in the...

This paper examines whether search and matching frictions in labor markets can account for cross-country differences in business cycle properties. The particular interest is the joint effect of two institutional variables, employment protection and the replacement income of unemployed workers. I...

This paper explains the weak 'Phillips correlation' under low trend inflation.This correlation is confirmed empirically but the standard sticky price models fail to account for it. This paper extends the standard sticky price model to the case of the "smoothed off kinked" demand curve, which is...

In this paper, we calculate the potential output and the output gap using a Bayesian-estimated DSGE model of Japan's economy. The model is a two-sector growth model that takes into account growth rate shocks including investment-goods sector-specific technological progress. For bridging the gap...

Many studies of inflation dynamics assume that in the presence of competitive labor markets firms adjust labor input only at the intensive margin. We consider labor market search and examine the role of the extensive margin for inflation dynamics by estimating three models with distinct labor...