This paper considers a dynamic, non-steady state environment in which wage dispersion exists and evolves in response to shocks. Workers do not observe firm productivity and firms do not commit to future wages, but there is on-the-job search for higher paying jobs. The model allows for firm...

This paper examines the movements of the Distance to Default (DD), a market-based measure of corporate default risk, of eight failed Japanese banks in order to evaluate the predictive power of the DD measure for bank failures. The DD became smaller in anticipation of failure in many cases. The...

In the late 1990s, several large Japanese banks failed for the first time in its postwar history. As the financial environment was deteriorating further, several remaining banks decided to merge among themselves, presumably, to make their operations more efficient to avoid failures. This paper...

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...

The Panic of 2007-2008 was a run on the sale and repurchase market (the "repo" market), which is a very large, short-term market that provides financing for a wide range of securitization activities and financial institutions. Repo transactions are collateralized, frequently with securitized...

Frequent price changes do not imply a rapid response of prices to economic shocks if the price changes are based on old information. We study the extent of such information "stickiness" for temporary sales. Institutionally, we describe how and why temporary sales are "sticky plans" that are...

Much debate exists around the impact that illegal file sharing may have on the creative industries. Similarly, opinions differ regarding whether the producers of artistic works should be forced to accept any weakening of intellectual property rights resulting from illegal file sharing, or if...

We examine the impact of loss of U.S. patent exclusivity (LOE) on the prices and utilization of specialty drugs between 2001 and 2007. We limit our empirical cohort to drugs commonly used to treat cancer and base our analyses on nationally representative data from IMS Health. We begin by...