The Japanese economy, once referred to as the miracle of the rising sun, now appears to be in its twilight. Burdened with a large overhang of non-performing debt, the economy has suffered a long period of recession. This book describes the process, from the burst of the bubble to stagnation, to...

We empirically analyze the effects of uncertainty on investment, by types of uncertainty and by properties of stochastic processes; that is, permanent and transitory components separated from economic variables. According to our results, based on Japanese economic data, we find significant...

Even though monetary policy has kept interest rates at historically low levels, the Japanese economy has experienced long lasting recessions since the 1990s. These recessions are commonly attributed to nominal interest rates coming up against the zero bound and to the delay in achieving...

The inflation rate in Japan has been decreasing since the beginning of the 1990s. Although weak domestic demand most probably explains a large part of the story of this deflationary trend, external factors such as the recent increase in the number of cheap imported goods, have played an...

Empirical studies in corporate finance have long been interested in the role of banks in reducing the costs of financial distress. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how various measures of bank health and how defaults of major trading partners affected the probability of bankruptcy...

After prolonged recessions, the Japanese economy finally recovered in the first half of the 2000s, and recorded sustained growth until summer 2007. The purpose of this paper is to examine, from both macro and micro perspectives, the role of international trade with China in the recovery of...

To analyze the relative price of nontradable to tradable goods, we build a two-country, two-sector dynamic open macro model that in based on consumers' intertemporal optimizing behavior. The model predicts that the relative price of nontradable goods depends on the cross-sectoral productivity...

Empirical studies in corporate finance have long been focused on the role of banks in reducing the costs of financial distress. The environment and events in Japan provide a "natural experiment" that allows such empirical studies. The number of bankruptcies steadily increased throughout the...

We develop a model in which sectoral trade patterns depend on both the technology common to all sectors and the technologies specific to each sector. Changes in the common technology level affect sectoral trade patterns through their impact on intertemporal optimization behavior, while changes...

This paper analyzes the time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model for the Japanese economy and monetary policy. The parameters are allowed to follow a random walk process and estimated using the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. The empirical result reveals the time-varying...