This paper compares the three recent episodes of boom and bust cycles in asset prices: Japan in the late 1980s to the 1990s; the U.S. since the mid 1990s; and China during the last decade. Although we have not yet seen a collapse of Chinese property prices, the increases so far are comparable to...

This paper offers a brief summary of non-traditional monetary policy measures adopted by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) during the last two decades, especially the period 1998-2006, when the so-called Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) and Quantitative Easing (QE) were put in place. The paper begins with...

　　 Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, has declared the adoption of a policy package that assigns a key role for aggressive monetary easing by the Bank of Japan—the so-called Abenomics. Since the announcement, the yen has weakened against the dollar by 25% and Nikkei 225 has...

This paper summarizes non-traditional monetary policy measures adopted by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) during the last two decades and by other G7 central banks since the start of the current global financial turmoil and analyzes the effectiveness of such measures. The paper begins with a typology of...

Both Japan in the late 1980s and the U.S. in the mid-2000s experienced an unsustainable boom in real estate prices along with high stock market valuations, and when the bubble burst, many households and financial institutions found themselves in dire straits. One major lesson from this...

　　 In this paper I investigate the causes of the recent sharp response of the yen and Japanese stock prices to the discussion of, and the subsequent implementation of bold monetary easing by the Bank of Japan as demanded by Prime Minister Abe. I present statistical evidence that...

This paper shows that the Japanese and Swiss foreign exchange interventions in 2003/04 and 2009/10 seem to have lowered long-term interest rates in a range of industrial countries, including Japan and Switzerland. It seems that this decline was triggered by the investment of the intervention...

This paper offers a brief summary of non-traditional monetary policy measures currently adopted by G7 central banks and their provisional evaluation in the light of the Bank of Japan (BOJ)'s experience during the period of 1998-2006. The paper points out that although unprecedented measures seem...

In this short note, I will explain the structure of Japan's financial regulation and supervision and discuss by way of examples the structure's weaknesses and strengths. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the role played by the Bank of Japan (BOJ). The paper focuses mostly on the period...

This paper reviews and evaluates the Bank of Japan (BOJ)'s monetary policy during the period 1998-2005. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the development of academic thinking on what central banks can do at or near zero interest rates and its relationship with the actual policy...