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...

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...

In recent years, an increasing number of central banks use macro stress-testing as a main tool to assess the robustness of the financial system against severe stresses to the economy, such as deep recessions and sharp rises in interest rates. This paper describes a framework for macro...

Despite the widespread belief that technology shocks are the main source of business fluctuations, recent empirical studies find that an investment efficiency shock mainly drives such fluctuations and reflects financial conditions for investment. This poses the question as to what is the major...

The observed decline in the relative price of investment goods in Japan suggests the existence of investment-specific technological (IST) changes. This paper examines whether IST changes are a major source of business fluctuations in Japan, by estimating a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium...

This paper presents an updated estimation of the total factor productivity (TFP) of the U.S. economy following the two preceding empirical studies, Basu et al. (2001) and Burnside et al. (1995). Based on these two estimation approaches, both of which carefully handle the potential estimation...

We present an empirical analysis on the New Keynesian Wage Phillips Curve (NKWPC), which is derived by Gali (2011) as a micro-founded structural relationship between wage inflation and the unemployment rate under a sticky wage framework using data for Japan and the US. We find that the empirical...

Since the mid-2000s, Japan's industrial production (IP) has been characterized by increasing volatility. To examine the background to this, we apply the structural factor analysis developed by Foerster, Sarte, and Watson (2011) and decompose variations in Japan's IP into aggregate and sectoral...