Search Results
Journal Article
Testing the expectations hypothesis: some new evidence for Japan
The deregulation of the Japanese financial markets and the adoption of an interest rate policy instrument by the Bank of Japan prompted a number of empirical investigations of the expectation hypothesis (EH) of the term structures of interest rates in Japan. This paper is a continuation of this research. It deviates from the previous work on the EH in Japan in two respects. First, it tests the EH by estimating a general vector autoregression (VAR) of the long-term and short-term rates and testing the restrictions implied by the EH on the VAR using a Lagrange multiplier test. Second, the issue ...
Journal Article
Interest rate targets abandoned
Journal Article
New measures of Japanese monetary policy
Working Paper
Preventing deflation: lessons from Japan's experience in the 1990s
This paper examines Japan's experience in the first half of the 1990s to shed some light on several issues that arise as inflation declines toward zero. Is it possible to recognize when an economy is moving into a phase of sustained deflation? How quickly should monetary policy respond to sharp declines in inflation? Are there factors that inhibit the monetary transmission mechanism as interest rates approach zero? What is the role for fiscal policy in warding off a deflationary episode? We conclude that Japan's sustained deflationary slump was very much unanticipated by Japanese policymakers ...
Conference Paper
Monetary transmission channels in major foreign industrial countries
Journal Article
Money, interest rates and economic activity: stylized facts for Japan
This paper examines how financial market changes affect the usefulness of two alternatve indicators of monetary policy in Japan, a monetary aggregate and an interest rate. The paper tests whether these variables are good predictors of output, and whether responses to shocks to these variables broadly conform to the implications of the monetary transmission model, over two periods between 1960 and 1992. In the earlier period when Japan's financial markets were less developed, a monetary aggregate (M2+CDs) is a relatively useful indicator of monetary policy whereas an interest rate ...
Periodic Essay
Japanese banks and rising bond yields