316 research outputs found
"Irreversible Investment and Knightian Uncertainty"
No full textWhen firms decide about irreversible investment, they may not have perfect confidence about their perceived probability measure describing future uncertainty. They may think other probability measures perturbed from the original one are also probable. Uncertainty characterized by not a single probability measure but a set of probability measures is called Knightian uncertainty. The effect of Knightian uncertainty on the value of irreversible investment opportunity is shown to be drastically different from that of the traditional uncertainty in the form of risk. Specifically, an increase in Knightian uncertainty decreases the value of investment opportunity while an increase in risk increases it.
2009 International Conference "Financial System and Monetary Policy Implementation" Summary
No full text"Trying to Make Sense of the Bank of Japan's Monetary Policy since the Exit from Quantitative Easing"
No full textIn this short note I review the Bank of Japan's monetary policy since its exit from the so-called quantitative easing regime early in 2006. The major characteristic of the policy stance during the period, called Strategy 2 below, has been to adjust the policy interest rate gradually upward in response to a healthy real economy despite stagnant behavior in consumer prices. Such a policy stance can be contrasted with a hypothetical strategy, Strategy 1, whereby the Bank of Japan would have kept the policy rate at lower levels, possibly at zero percent, until inflation starts to show an upward trend more clearly. The two strategies are compared on many fronts with particular attention to well-known recent empirical regularities about inflation -a smaller response of inflation to output and larger uncertainties about the response. Various comparisons of the two strategies offered here, though far from conclusive, tend to support Strategy 1 over Strategy 2. In my discussion of the two strategies I also comment on some of the major features of the Nishimura article in this issue.
Trying to Make Sense of the Bank of Japan's Monetary Policy sinse the Exit from Quantitative Easing ( Published in "International Finance", Winter 2007, Vol. 10, No.3, 301-16. )
No full textIn this short note I review the Bank of Japan?s monetary policy since its exit from the so-called quantitative easing regime early in 2006. The major characteristic of the policy stance during the period, called Strategy 2 below, has been to adjust the policy interest rate gradually upward in response to a healthy real economy despite stagnant behavior in consumer prices. Such a policy stance can be contrasted with a hypothetical strategy, Strategy 1, whereby the Bank of Japan would have kept the policy rate at lower levels, possibly at zero percent, until inflation starts to show an upward trend more clearly. The two strategies are compared on many fronts with particular attention to well-known recent empirical regularities about inflation —a smaller response of inflation to output and larger uncertainties about the response. Various comparisons of the two strategies offered here, though far from conclusive, tend to support Strategy 1 over Strategy 2. In my discussion of the two strategies I also comment on some of the major features of the Nishimura article in this issue.
"An Axiomatic Approach to ƒÃ-contamination"
No full textSuppose that an economic agent is (1|ƒÃ)~100% certain that uncertainty she faces is characterized by a particular probability measure, but that she has a fear that, with ƒÃ~100% chance, her conviction is completely wrong and she is left perfectly ignorant about the true measure in the present as well as in the future.This situation is often called "ƒÃ-contamination of con dence." The purpose of this paper is to provide a simple set of behavioral axioms under which the decision-maker's preference is represented by the Choquet expected utility with the ƒÃ-contamination of con dence.
"Economics of Self-Feeding Fear"
No full textA model of self-feeding fear is presented. Suppose that an economic agent is (1-ƒÃ)~100% certain that uncertainty she faces is characterized by a particular probability measure, but that she has a fear that, with ƒÃ~100% chance, her conviction is completely wrong and she is left perfectly ignorant about the true measure in the present as well as in the future. We call this situation ƒÃ-contamination of confidence. In this situation, if the economic agent follows Bayesian procedure or its variant, which is considered as rational in the theory of economics, her confidence erodes after having new observation.
Residential Rents and Price Rigidity: Micro structure and macro consequences
No full textWhy was the Japanese consumer price index for rents so stable even during the period of the housing bubble in the 1980s? To address this question, we use a unique micro price dataset which we have compiled from individual listings (or transactions) in a widely circulated real estate advertisement magazine. This dataset contains more than 700 thousand listings of housing rents over the last twenty years. We start from the analysis of microeconomic rigidity and then investigate its implications for aggregate price dynamics, closely following the empirical strategy proposed by Caballero and Engel (2007). We find that 90 percent of the units in our dataset had no change in rents per year, indicating that rent stickiness is three times as high as in the United States. We also find that the probability of rent adjustment depends little on the deviation of the actual rent from its target level, suggesting that rent adjustments are not state dependent but time dependent. These two results indicate that both the intensive and extensive margins of rent adjustments are small, resulting in a slow response of the CPI for rent to aggregate shocks. We show that the CPI inflation rate would have been higher by 1 percentage point during the bubble period, and lower by more than 1 percentage point during the period following the burst of the bubble, if Japanese housing rents were as exible as those in the United States.
"Measuring the Cost of Imperfect Information in the Tokyo Housing Market"
No full textThe cost of imperfect information is estimated in the real estate market of resale condominiums in central Tokyo by using a new, comprehensive data set of resale condominium transactions. The results suggest a substantial cost. Specifically, if information were perfectly available and marketing time is null, sellers would get benefits of 10.58% based on average interest rate, 31.28% on gross rent and 22.59% on net rent, against imputed rent of their property. Buyers spend 1,042,000 Yen on search activities for one transaction, which would be saved if information were prefect. This cost amounts to be equivalent to 13.2% of buyers' average annual income.
Future of Central Banking under Globalization: Summary of the 2010 International Conference Organized by the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies of the Bank of Japan
No full text"Innovation Versus Diffusion: Determinants of Productivity Growth Among Japanese Firms"
No full textThis paper presents a model of firm-level productivity growth that distinguishes between innovation and technology diffusion, and then applies the model to a large-scale data set of Japanese manufacturing and non-manufacturing firms between 1994 and 2000. We find both innovation and diffusion are important factors in firm-level productivity growth. Results also suggest that innovation comes not only directly from R&D activities, but also indirectly from patent purchases and imports. Previously, patent purchases and imports were considered as sources of technology diffusion rather than innovation. In fact, we find patent purchases are more effective in this regard than R&D expenditure.
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