This paper provides an overview of the sustainability of Japan’s government debt, emphasizing the viewpoint of market participants in the Japanese government bonds (JGB) market. The Japanese government will be able to finance its debt as long as current surpluses continue, meaning there is...

This paper provides an in-depth review and analysis of household portfolios in Japan. (1) Using both aggregate and disaggregate data, it is shown that the shares of equities in household financial wealth have been decreasing throughout the 1990s. Stock market participations of Japanese...

The decline in Japan's household saving rate accelerated sharply after 1998, but then decelerated again from 2003. Such nonlinear movement in the saving rate cannot be explained by the monotonic trend of population aging alone. According to the life cycle model of consumption and saving,...

Using the data from the Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations by Industry (FSSCI), we examine whether the decrease of corporate debt subsequent to the banking crisis in the late 1990s improved the efficiency of factor allocation at the microeconomic level. While the cross-sectoral...

This paper examines the behavior of stock and land prices during the bubble economy of the second half of the 1980s, paying considerable attention to the linkage of the two markets and the effects of monetary policy.In particular, we first examine whether the boom in asset prices can be...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic policies--dubbed Abenomics--have been successful on some but not all fronts. The Japanese government must still pursue policies to increase economic growth. This PIIE Briefing, released on the heels of Prime Minister Abe's election victory in December, calls...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic policies--dubbed Abenomics--have been successful on some but not all fronts. The Japanese government must still pursue policies to increase economic growth. This PIIE Briefing, released on the heels of Prime Minister Abe's election victory in December, calls...