The consumer price inflation rate in Japan has been below zero since the mid-1990s. However, despite the presence of a substantial output gap, the rate of deflation has been much smaller than that observed in the United States during the Great Depression. Given this, doubts have been raised...

Official price indexes, such as the CPI, are imperfect indicators of inflation calculated using ad hoc price formulae different from the theoretically well-founded inflation indexes favored by economists. This paper provides the first estimate of how accurately the CPI informs us about "true"...

Understanding the mutual relationships between information flows and social activity in society today is one of the cornerstones of the social sciences. In financial economics, the key issue in this regard is understanding and quantifying how news of all possible types (geopolitical,...

We empirically investigate temporal and cross correlations in the frequency of news reports on companies, using a unique dataset with more than 100 million news articles reported in English by around 500 press agencies worldwide for the period 2003-2009. We find, first, that the frequency of...

From the beginning of 2003 to the spring of 2004, Japan's monetary authorities conducted large-scale yen-selling/dollar-buying operations in what Taylor (2006) has labeled the "Great Intervention." This paper examines the relationship between this "Great Intervention" and the quantitative easing...

Consumer price inflation in Japan has been below zero since the mid-1990s. Given this, it is difficult for firms to raise product prices in response to an increase in marginal cost. One pricing strategy firms have taken in this situation is to reduce the size or the weight of a product while...

In this paper, we empirically investigate how real estate prices are affected by aging. We run regional panel regressions for Japan and the United States. Our regression results show that, both in Japan and the U.S., real estate prices in a region are inversely correlated with the old age...

Why are product prices in online markets dispersed in spite of very small search costs? To address this question, we construct a unique dataset from a Japanese price comparison site, which records price quotes offered by e-retailers as well as customers’clicks on products, which occur...

We discuss a mechanism through which inversion symmetry (i.e., invariance of a joint probability density function under the exchange of variables) and Gibrat's law generate power-law distributions with different tail exponents. Using a dataset of firm size variables, that is, tangible fixed...