Recently, Japanese commercial banks have been expanding their fee-based business. The present study conducts a panel-data analysis to investigate the impact of such a diversification of commercial banking on the variability of banks' profitability and the stability of their management. Our...

Closer relationships are now being observed between the uncollateralized call rate, which is heavily influenced by the Bank of Japan's money market operations, and the Euroyen rate and the yen funding rate in the dollar/yen swap market, reflecting more dynamic arbitrage operations by...

The prospective normalisation of monetary policies in the main OECD areas will be challenging given that current policy rates are likely to be significantly below neutral levels and that central bank balance sheets will be above the pre-crisis levels by a wide margin. Monetary policy...

This paper investigates whether OECD countries are facing secular stagnation. Secular stagnation is defined as a situation when policy interest rates bounded at zero fail to stimulate demand sufficiently, due to low or negative neutral real interest rates and low inflation, and when ensuing...

The set of monetary policy instruments has expanded since the start of the global financial crisis in the many OECD economies. Against this background, this paper analyses whether some of the new instruments should be retained in the long term when broader financial stability objectives are...

This paper describes developments in real long-term interest rates in the main OECD economies and surveys their various determinants. Real long-term government bond yields declined from the 1980s to very low levels in the recent period, though they have not reached the historical lows of the...