Japan has suffered from long-lasting but mild deflation since the latter half of the 1990s. Estimates of a standard Phillips curve indicate that a decline in inflation expectations, the negative output gap, and other factors such as a decline in import prices and a higher exchange rate, all...

Credit ratings have become an indispensable part of the fundamental information infrastructure of credit markets. Credit ratings cover a wide range of issuers including governments, governmental organizations, municipalities, nonfinancial companies and financial institutions, and also cover...

Japanese government bonds (JGBs) have a range of uses in broad market trading. To ensure that market transactions involving JGBs operate smoothly, sufficient liquidity in JGB markets is an important condition. There are a number of concepts for evaluating liquidity in JGB markets, and the...

One of the most important agendas for the revival of the Japanese economy is to improve direct financing channels for firms. Over the past few months, financial experts were invited to a "Study Group on the Securitization of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises' Receivables," held at the Financial...

Japan's financial structure has changed since the later half of the 1990s. The results of the Japanese "Big Bang" initiative have gradually manifested themselves in the domestic financial structure. The key factor here was the financial crisis of 1997- 1998. Throughout the 1990s, the household...

In this paper, we construct a simple measure of sectoral credit shifts, defined as the dispersion of growth rates of bank loans across sectors, and investigate what effects they had on Japan's economy and what accounted for their development. We find that (i) during the 1990s, the amount of...

This paper investigates what can be learned about the effects of monetary policy on firm investment after the collapse of the asset price bubble in Japan. By estimating firm investment functions based on corporate panel data, the paper reveals that the monetary easing after the bubble burst...

Based on newly constructed prefectural land price data, we estimate long-run equilibrium relationships using a panel cointegration analysis, and then estimate an error-correction model (ECM) for land prices. The panel cointegration analysis reveals that the PVR cum price expectation can be...

Economists at central banks and in academia have made various efforts to measure potential growth, something that cannot be observed directly. This review introduces some of these estimation techniques and applies them to the Japanese data. The estimates of the potential growth rate can differ...

This paper investigates (i) what has determined the land investment behavior of Japanese firms since the latter half of the 1980s; and (ii) how the current market prices of their land assets diverge from their shadow prices (marginal values of land investment). To do so, we estimate nonlinear...