Since August 1995, Japanese banks have had to pay a premium on Eurodollar and Euroyen interbank loans relative to their U.S. and U.K. competitors. This so-called Japan premium' provides a market indicator of investor anxiety about the ability of Japanese banks to repay loans. We examine the...

This paper investigates empirically the effects of personal and corporate taxes on taxable interest rates and on the spread between taxable and tax-exempt rates. Two main sets of results emerge. First, we establish that the effective marginal investors in the Treasury bill market are households,...

Household or personal saving is recomputed to include net purchases of consumer durables, net contributions to government life insurance and pension reserves, and an adjustment for the inflation premium component in interest income. These adjustments raise the measured household saving rate by...

This study investigates whether the apparent intertemporal instability of a particular reduced-form equation (that for interest rates) can be explained by changing government policy parameters, or regimes, and otherwise stable structural parameters. We hypothesize that major fiscal, monetary,...

This article demonstrates why the procedures used in previous studies do not permit inference about the relationship between interestrates and taxes. We present a model that leads to direct estimates of the degree to which interest rates respond to changes in tax rates. The empirical results...

This study examines the misallocation of credit in Japan associated with the perverse incentives of banks to provide additional credit to the weakest firms. Firms are far more likely to receive additional credit if they are in poor financial condition, and these firms continue to perform poorly...

The relative wealth hypothesis of Froot and Stein (1991), motivated by the aggregate correlation between real exchange rates and foreign direct investment (FDI) observed in the 1980s, cannot explain one of the major shifts in FDI in the 1990s: the continued decline in Japanese FDI during a...

The Reagan Administration entered office in 1981 with one of the clearest and moat ambitious agendas in recent times. The new administration advanced five economic/budgetary goals to rebuild America economically and militarily: (1) reduce inflation, (2) deregulate the economy, (3) cut taxes, (4)...

As is widely recognized, real interest rates in the early 1980s were at peaks not witnessed since the late 1920s. Less well perceived is the sharp decline in real interest rates since 1984. By 1986-88, real interest rates were back at their average levels of the previous quarter century. This...

The official personal and private saving statistics contain a number of conceptual measurement errors. In this paper we develop and analyze personal and private saving measures adjusted for the difference between income tax payments and actual liabilities, saving via net purchases of government...