This paper develops asymptotic econometric theory to help understand data generated by a present value model with a discount factor near one. A leading application is to exchange rate models. A key assumption of the asymptotic theory is that the discount factor approaches 1 as the sample size...

The size of Japanese bank lending operations in the United States enables the authors to use U.S. banking data to investigate the extent to which the sharp decline in Japanese stock prices was transmitted to the United States via U.S. branches of Japanese parent banks, as well as to identify a...

The Japanese banking crisis provides a natural experiment to test whether a loan supply shock can affect real economic activity. Because the shock was external to U.S. credit markets, yet connected through the Japanese bank penetration of U.S. markets, this event allows us to identify an...

The relative wealth hypothesis of Froot and Stein (1991), motivated by the aggregate correlation between real exchange rates and foreign direct investment (FDI) observed in the 1980s, cannot explain one of the major shifts in FDI in the 1990s: the continued decline in Japanese FDI during a...

This paper investigates empirically the effects of personal and corporate taxes on taxable interest rates and on the spread between taxable and tax-exempt rates. Two main sets of results emerge. First, we establish that the effective marginal investors in the Treasury bill market are households,...