This paper examines whether the sensitivity of corporate investment to internal funds depends on the firm's access to a main bank, using the sample of Japanese manufacturing firms constructed by Hayashi and Inoue (1991). For either of two classifications of firms by their access to a main bank,...

What is the basic economic decision-making unit? Is it the household or the extended family? This question is fundamental to economic analysis and policy design. The answer given by the Life Cycle and Keynesian models is that the economic unit is the household. According to these models, members...

We derive from a model of investment with multiple capital goods a one-to-one relation between the growth rate of the capital aggregate and the stock market-based Q. We estimate the growth-Q relation using a panel of Japanese manufacturing firms taking into account the endogeneity of Q....

This paper presents a life-cycle simulation analysis of the interaction among savings decisions, housing purchase decisions, and the tax system in the United States and Japan. To investigate this issue, we first document the stylized fact that the typical Japanese household purchases a house...

This paper attempts to provide a framework for analyzing the interaction between real decisions (concerning investment and factor inputs)and financial decisions (concerning debt and new share issues) of a corporation. The model carries a rich menu of tax rates and explicitly incorporates...

We present an infinite horizon model with capital in which fiat money and barter are two competing means of payment. Fiat money has value because barter is limited by the extent of a double coincidence of wants. The pattern of exchange generally involves both money and barter. We find that the...

This paper examines the impact of taxes on the incentive to invest for the Japanese manufacturing sector in the postwar period. The idyosyricratic feature of the Japanese corporation tax system as compared to the U.S. is the prevelence of tax-free reserves and the tax deductibility of a part of...

This paper surveys recent empirical work on tests for liquidity constraints.The focus of the survey is on the tests based on the Euler equation. After examining the technical aspects of the recent tests on aggregate time-series data and on micro data, the survey tries to evaluate their economic...

We discuss the foreign currency forward premium puzzle in the context of 20 internationally tradable emerging market currencies. We find that since the late 1990s the broad basket of emerging market currencies has provided significant equity-like excess returns against a number of major market...

This paper examines the effect of liquidity constraints on consumption expenditures using a single-time cross-section data set. A reduced-form equation for consumption is estimated on high-saving households by the Tobit procedure to account for the selectivity bias. Since high-saving households...