This paper investigates how firms' borrowing costs evolve as they age. Using a new panel data set of about 100,000 bank-dependent small firms for 1997-2002 and focusing on the channel of "adaptation" (i.e., surviving firms' borrowing costs decline as they age) and that of "selection" (i.e.,...

This paper investigates how a firm's borrowing cost evolves as it ages. Using a new data set of more than 200,000 bank-dependent small firms in 1997-2002, we find the following. First, the distribution of borrowing cost tends to become less skewed to the right over time. Second, this shift of...

Official price indexes, such as the CPI, are imperfect indicators of inflation calculated using ad hoc price formulae different from the theoretically well-founded inflation indexes favored by economists. This paper provides the first estimate of how accurately the CPI informs us about "true"...

Using a simultaneous-move herding model of rational traders who infer other traders' private information on the value of an asset by observing their aggre- gate actions, this study seeks to explain the emergence of fat-tailed distributions of transaction volumes and asset returns in financial...

In this paper, we empirically investigate how real estate prices are affected by aging. We run regional panel regressions for Japan and the United States. Our regression re- sults show that, both in Japan and the U.S., real estate prices in a region are inversely correlated with the old age...

We construct a T¨ornqvist daily price index using Japanese point of sale (POS) scanner data spanning from 1988 to 2013. We find the following. First, the POS based inflation rate tends to be about 0.5 percentage points lower than the CPI inflation rate, although the difference between the two...

In this paper, we investigate the structure and evolution of customer-supplier networks in Japan using a unique dataset that contains information on customer and supplier linkages for more than 500,000 incorporated non-financial firms for the five years from 2008 to 2012. We find, first, that...

Why are product prices in online markets dispersed in spite of very small search costs? To address this question, we construct a unique dataset from a Japanese price comparison site, which records price quotes offered by e-retailers as well as customers' clicks on products, which occur when they...

Standard New Keynesian models have often neglected temporary sales. In this paper, we ask whether this treatment is appropriate. In the empirical part of the pa- per, we provide evidence using Japanese scanner data covering the last two decades that the frequency of sales was closely related...