This paper proposes a new three-factor model with stochastic mean reversions for commodity prices and derives the closed-form solution for the term structure of futures prices. It also examines the relation of our model with Schwartz(1997) type models that explicitly include interest rates and...

This paper proposes a structural model to price credit risk of firms with short-term and long-term debts. This enables one to distinguish between default probabilities in the short run and in the long run, and to identify how the composition of debts affects credit risk. We endogenize the banks'...

It is the common knowledge that the modern textile factories, cotton spinning and silk reeling, which led the Japan's industrialization, based their labor foundation on the juvenile female workers. These female workers, however, might have made only a slight impact on the indigenous development...

This is a short essay giving the author's view on recent discussions on the economic rationale of equity style management. The essay will be printed in "Perspectives" of the Security Analysts Journal, January 2006.

This research focuses on the decommissioning cost and the recycle cost of used nuclear fuel, which are incurred by nuclear power plant. We examine what incentive factors affect the discretionary measurement of those expenses in the year and investigate whether the discretionary components are...

The central bank as the Lender of Last Resort (LLR) is faced with a trade off between the stability of the financial system and the moral hazard of banks. In this paper we explore how this trade off was dealt with by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) in the pre-war period, and how LLR lending by the BOJ...

This paper overviews the industrial organization in Japan in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Using comprehensive plant-level data, I made clear the market structure of the manufacturing industry in 1902. It was found that the level of market concentration in Japan was...

Applying the ordered probit model to household data, we investigate people's behavior against unexpected losses caused by the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) earthquake in 1995. We found that credit market played an important role in providing an effective risk-coping measure. In the process of...

Under the financial turbulence, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) had launched a series of unprecedented monetary policies in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The policies were not effective under liquidity trap from a view point of classical macroeconomics. However, they were powerful in providing...

Long-term economic plans were one of the major issues of the economic policy in Japan from the late 1930s to the 1950s. In this paper, we focus on three long-term economic plans in this period, namely the Production Capacity Expansion Plan in 1939 and 1942, the Economic Reconstruction Plan in...