How central banks can best communicate to the market is an increasingly important topic in the central banking literature. With ever greater frequency, central banks communicate to the market through the forecasts of prices and output with the purposes of reducing uncertainty; at the same time,...

This paper investigates whether balance-sheet conditions of firms and their main banks matter for firm investment behavior using dynamic corporate panel data in Japan for the period 1985-95. It finds that smaller non-bond issuing firms were facing liquidity constraints; these firms’...

This paper estimates an inflation function and forecasts one-year ahead inflation for Japan. It finds that (i) markup relationships, excess money and the output gap are particularly relevant long-run determinants for an equilibrium correction model (EqCM) of inflation; (ii) with intercept...