With interest rates near the zero lower bound, I propose a simple framework to indicate the monetary policy stance as a “shadow short rate”. I apply a one-factor model to Japan, provide associated economic intuition, and discuss multiple-factor extensions.

This paper extends previous results on the equality of OLS and GLS. We give conditions under which GLS based on two different variance matrices gives the same estimate, and also conditions under which GLS equals a GMM estimator.

We study the leading properties of 30 US high yield spreads for economic growth between 1996 and 2012 and show that they disappeared in the second half of the 2000s. Our empirical findings demonstrate the unreliability of high yield spreads as leading indicators and cast doubts on the existence...

We find that short rates are more nonstationary than longer rates and that differences in conditional volatility exist between different maturities. Therefore, their dynamics may be both maturity specific and country specific, and any a priori generalizing assumptions may be misleading.

This paper considers a factor-augmented regression model in the presence of structural change. We propose a two-step procedure to estimate the coefficients of explanatory variables. We show that when the number of units (N) and the number of periods (T) are large and comparable, the proposed...

This paper proposes using the Gaussian approximation, also known as quantile coupling, to estimate a quantile model. The quantile coupling allows one to apply the standard Gaussian-based estimation and inference to the transformed data set. The resulting estimator is asymptotically normal with a...

This paper provides evidence of a negative association between macroeconomic uncertainty and the cross sectional dispersion of investment rate for a panel of Japanese manufacturing firms. We show that an increase in uncertainty leads to the narrowing of the cross section dispersion of investment...

The nonparametric identification of the local average treatment effect (LATE) hinges on the satisfaction of three instrumental variable assumptions: (1) unconfounded assignment of the instrument, (2) no average direct effect of the instrument on the outcome within compliance types (exclusion...

We investigate the impact of monetary conditions on stock market returns at different points on the return distributions. Our results reveal no association between stock returns and monetary environments at the lower quantiles. At the upper quantiles, however, we find that expansive monetary...

In this paper, we derive a class of modified score tests robust to local and distributional misspecifications for testing spatial error autocorrelation and spatial lag dependence. The proposed tests are general enough to include several popular tests for the spatial dependence as special cases....