The authors use stock market valuations to construct estimates of the cost of capital for five U.S. and four Japanese securities firms in 1982-91. They seek explanations for the observed capital cost differences in macroeconomic, risk, policy, and industrial organization factors. Their analysis...

The collapse of Japanese asset prices in the 1990s sharply reduced the wealth of Japanese banks and life insurers and slowed their international activity. This article traces the channels through which wealth changes altered these intermediaries' growth, pricing, and portfolio strategies. The...

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