This study examines the two-decade long low interest rate environment in Japan using the Nelson-Siegel yield curve framework. As a possible “Japanification” of bond markets, we found that the decay factor has been declining in Japan for the past two decades, and this decline has been pushing...

The paper presents a theoretical model to explain how debt overhang is generated in low-income countries and discusses its implications for debt relief. The paper indicates that the extent of debt overhang, and the effectiveness of debt relief, would depend on a recipient country's initial...

The paper relies on a firm-level data on transition economies to examine the relationship between informality and bank credit. We find evidence that informality is robustly and significantly associated with lower access to and use of bank credit. We also find that higher tax compliance costs...

I construct a no-arbitrage term structure model with endogenous regime shifts and apply it to Japanese government bond (JGB) yields. This application subjects the short-term interest rate to monetary regime shifts, such as a zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) and normal regimes, which depend on...

We develop a regime-switching SVAR (structural vector autoregression) in which the monetary policy regime, chosen by the central bank responding to economic conditions, is endogenous and observable. There are two regimes, one of which is QE (quantitative easing). The model can incorporate the...

We estimate a structural vector autoregressive model with an effective lower bound (ELB) using Japanese macroeconomic and financial data from the mid-90s to the end of 2016. The estimated results show that the Bank of Japan's quantitative and qualitative easing (QQE) policy increased output via...

We propose an empirical framework for analyzing the macroeconomic effects of quantitative easing (QE) and apply it to Japan. QE is modeled using a structural regime-switching vector regression framework with two distinct monetary policy rules, endogenous switching between them depending on the...

We estimate a canonical sovereign default model from Arellano (2008) for Argentina via maximum simulated likelihood estimation to understand how well it performs in terms of predicting default events. The estimated model accounts for the overall default patterns of Argentina and closely matches...