Many economists dismiss the role of positive supply shocks as a cause of Japan's deflation. Indeed, they attribute the long delay in Japan's recovery to the mistaken view that Japan's deflation reflects an acceleration of technological progress. Whatever the current situation in Japan, however,...

Using industry-level data of the Japan Industrial Productivity Database (JIP Database) and firm-level data of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Basic Survey of Enterprises, we investigate the causes of the recent slowdown in Japan's total factor productivity (TFP) growth. We show...

Japan's traditionally high household saving rate has declined substantially since the early 1990s. While this decline is often explained as a result of the rapid increase in the population share of the elderly who are dissaving, we argue that the cause is a decline in interest income triggered...

This paper presents an autocorrelation test that is applicable to dynamic panel data models with serially correlated errors. Our residual-based GMM t-test (hereafter: t-test) differs from the m2 and Sargan's over-identifying restriction (hereafter: Sargan test) in Arellano and Bond (1991), both...

This paper studies the intranational business cycle -that is the set of regional (prefecture) business cycles- in Japan. One reason for choosing to examine the Japanese case is that long time series and relatively detailed data are available. A Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied to identify the...

This paper investigates the effects of human capital on productivity using micro panel data of rural households in the NorthWest Frontier Province, Pakistan, where a substantial job stratification is observed in terms of income and education. To clarify the mechanism underlying this...

This paper looks at the case of Myanmar in order to investigate the behavior and welfare of rural households in an economy under transition from a planned to a market system. Myanmar's case is particularly interesting because of the country's unique attempt to preserve a policy of intervention...

Despite the zero lower bound on the short nominal interest rate in Japan having become a binding constraint, conventional monetary policy in Japan, in the form of generalised open market purchases of government securities of all maturities, has never been pushed to the limit where all...