Employing the neutral Kindleberger definition of a bubble as "an upward price movement over an extended range that then implodes", this paper explores the causes of the "Japanese Bubble" of 1985 to 1990 without precluding the possibility that the bubble was due to perceptions of fundamentals....

Japanization is defined as a combinations of the following economic conditions: (1) the actual growth rate is lower than the potential growth rate for an extended period; (2) the natural real interest rate is below zero and also below the actual real interest rate; (3) the nominal (policy)...

We show that the behaviour of the real exchange rates of the UK, Germany, France and Japan has been characterized by structural breaks, which changed the adjustment mechanism. In the context of a Time-Varying Smooth Transition Autoregression (TV-STAR) of the kind introduced by Lundbergh et al....