This paper describes and compares the regulation and supervision of banks in Japan and Germany. We have chosen these countries because they have both bank-dominated financial systems and belong to the same law tradition, yet, bank stability differs significantly. We ask to what extent these...

This paper analyzes the privatization process of the Japanese Post Bank (JPB), the largest bank in the world. We report some evidence in favour of the "political view" of SOB's and argue that, before privatization, postal savings banks served as vehicles for politicians to reallocate funds in...

Measured by the size of their respective currency areas, the Bank of Japan and Eurosystem both belong to the most important central banks in the world. Though they have many institutional features in common and conduct monetary policy almost in similar ways, there are still important...

We describe the propagation of the recent financial crisis to Japan and compare current monetary policy reactions by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) with actions taken during the 1990s and with current policy reactions by other major central banks. First, we review the recent literature on the origins...