Fluctuations in housing prices have substantial economic impacts. Thus, it is essential to develop housing price indexes that can adequately capture housing market trends. However, construction of such indexes is very difficult due to the fact that residential properties are heterogeneous and do...

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 costs. One pricing strategy firms have taken in this situation is to reduce the size or the weight of a product while...

Using a simultaneous-move herding model of rational traders who infer other traders' private information on the value of an asset by observing their aggre- gate actions, this study seeks to explain the emergence of fat-tailed distributions of transaction volumes and asset returns in financial...

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 re- sults show that, both in Japan and the U.S., real estate prices in a region are inversely correlated with the old age...

We construct a T¨ornqvist daily price index using Japanese point of sale (POS) scanner data spanning from 1988 to 2013. We find the following. First, the POS based inflation rate tends to be about 0.5 percentage points lower than the CPI inflation rate, although the difference between the two...

In this paper, we investigate the structure and evolution of customer-supplier networks in Japan using a unique dataset that contains information on customer and supplier linkages for more than 500,000 incorporated non-financial firms for the five years from 2008 to 2012. We find, first, that...

We consider a competitive bank loan market model where the marginal costs of managing and monitoring loans are assumed to increase as borrowers' net worth decreases. We show that the responsiveness of equilibrium bank loan rates to changes in interbank money market rates become weaker as...

This paper estimates fiscal policy feedback rules in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom for more than a century, allowing for stochastic regime changes. Estimating a Markov-switching model by the Bayesian method, we find the following: First, the Japanese data clearly reject the...

By analyzing a huge amount of point-of-sale data collected from Japanese supermarkets, we find power law relationships between price and sales numbers. The estimated values of the exponents of these power laws depend on the category of products; however, they are independent of the stores,...

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...