In this paper, we present data on recent trends in private consumption and in possible determinants of private consumption (such as GDP, household incomes, household saving rates, household wealth, and employment conditions) in the Group of Seven (G7) countries and find that there has been...

In this paper, we analyze the determinants of corporate saving in the form of changes in the stock of cash for 11 Asian economies using firm-level data from the Oriana Database for the 2002 - 2011 period. We find some evidence that cash flow has a positive impact on the change in the stock of...

What are the consequences of the preference for wealth for the accumulation of capital and for the dynamics of wealth inequality? Assuming that wealth per se is a luxury good, inequality tends to rise whenever the interest rate is larger than the economic growth rate. This induces the economy to...

The house price in Hong Kong is well-known to be "unaffordable." This paper argues that the commonly used house price-to-income ratio may be misleading in an economy with almost half of the population living in either public rental housing or subsidized ownership. Moreover, we re-focus on the...

It has been empirically observed that consumption responds positively to government spending shock, however, existing models with intertemporally-optimizing households do not easily reconcile this stylized fact. This paper aims to address this discrepancy between models and data, focusing on the...

We examined investment behavior in the Japanese manufacturing industry using investment revision data to analyze investment behavior from a fresh angle. We tested the martingale investment hypothesis and then the q-theory of investment by looking at the response of stock return and investment to...

Employing a new accounting data set we apply the framework of McGrattan and Prescott (2005) to the Japanese economy in order to assess if Japanese stocks were priced correctly in the period after 1980. We find that the stock market tended to undervalue the fundamental value of installed capital....

I consider how heterogeneity in capital goods affects international trade patterns, and I show a novel source of comparative advantage: the magnitude of capital goods heterogeneity. Capital goods are heterogeneous in their vintage and productivity, and due to capacity constraints, only...

Development accounting shows that a significant part of cross-country income differences is attributed to differences in total factor productivity (TFP), but the sources of TFP differences are not well understood. This paper considers the role of international trade to explain cross-country...

We examine quantitatively the extent to which financial distress in the 90s affected Japanese corporate investment. Based on the firm-level data that includes small, unlisted firms, we estimate investment function to measure the impact of financial distress on investment. We find that the...