Despite the widespread belief that technology shocks are the main source of business fluctuations, recent empirical studies find that an investment efficiency shock mainly drives such fluctuations and reflects financial conditions for investment. This poses the question as to what is the major...

The observed decline in the relative price of investment goods in Japan suggests the existence of investment-specific technological (IST) changes. This paper examines whether IST changes are a major source of business fluctuations in Japan, by estimating a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium...

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) estimates the output gap and the potential growth rate, and uses these in judging economic and price conditions. The output gap and potential growth rate have been recently re-estimated in light of the benchmark revision of the GDP statistics at the end of 2005. At the...

The history of financial crises, including the recent global crisis, shows that post-financial-crisis recoveries tend to be slower than usual recoveries. Against this background lie various factors, one of which is a slowdown in productivity induced by a post-crisis deterioration in firms'...

The history of financial crises, including the recent global crisis, shows that post-financial-crisis recoveries tend to be slower than usual recoveries. Against this background lie various factors, one of which is a slowdown in productivity induced by a post-crisis deterioration in firms'...

Recent empirical literature suggests that the degree of nominal rigidities varies over monetary policy regimes. This implies that monetary policy analysis with exogenously given nominal rigidities is subject to the Lucas critique. In a Calvo-style sticky price model, we endogenize nominal...

Recent studies show that the Taylor rule possesses desirable properties in terms of generating determinacy and E-stability of rational expectations equilibria under sticky prices. This paper examines whether this policy rule retains these properties within a discrete-time...

Many studies of inflation dynamics assume that in the presence of competitive labor markets firms adjust labor input only at the intensive margin. We consider labor market search and examine the role of the extensive margin for inflation dynamics by estimating three models with distinct labor...

This paper structurally investigates the changes in the Federal Reserve's communication strategy during the 1990s by analyzing anticipated and unanticipated disturbances to a Taylor rule. The anticipated monetary policy disturbances are identified by estimating a medium-scale dynamic stochastic...