This paper compares the private law of the United States and Japan that applies to the holding of securities through intermediaries, such as securities firms and banks. In particular, it focuses on Articles 8 and 9 of the United States Uniform Commercial Code and the Japanese Book-Entry Transfer...

In this paper, we propose a simple methodology for investigating how shocks to trend and cycle are correlated in unidentified unobserved components models, in which the correlation is not identified. The proposed methodology is applied to U.S. and U.K. real GDP data. We find that the correlation...

Volatile and persistent real exchange rates are observed not only in aggregate series but also in the individual good level data. Kehoe and Midrigan (2007) recently showed that, under a standard assumption on nominal price stickiness, empirical frequencies of micro price adjustment cannot...

The purpose of this paper is to study whether trade frictions in durable goods markets help account for the patterns of household consumption expenditures observed in the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), namely that the response of durable goods expenditures to income shocks is 78 percent...

We estimate monetary policy activism, defined as responsiveness of the policy interest rate to inflation, among five inflation-targeting countries (the UK, Canada, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand) plus the G3 (the US, Japan and Germany) by applying a time- varying parameter with a...

This paper proposes the EGARCH model with jumps and heavy- tailed errors, and studies the empirical performance of different models including the stochastic volatility models with leverage, jumps and heavy-tailed errors for daily stock returns. In the framework of a Bayesian inference, the...

This paper derives a generalized optimal interest rate rule that is optimal even under a zero lower bound on nominal interest rates in an otherwise basic New Keynesian model with inflation inertia. Using this optimal rule, we investigate optimal entrance and exit strategies of the zero interest...

The co-movement of output across the sector producing non- durables (that is, non-durable goods and services) and the sector producing durables is well-established in the monetary business-cycle literature. However, standard sticky-price models that incorporate sectoral heterogeneity in price...

This paper investigates the implications for monetary policy of financial markets that are internationally integrated but have intrinsic frictions. When there is no other distortion than financial market imperfections in the form of staggered international loan contracts, financial stability,...

Recent empirical studies reveal that the oil price-output relationship is weakening in the US. Oil price-output correlation is less negative, and output reduction in response to oil price rise is more moderate after mid 1980s. In contrast to the conventional view that there have been changes in...