Masanori Ono

This paper investigates the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy in Japan by taking into account people's price expectations. First, a stability test revealed that the effects of the 2011 earthquake were not strong enough to have caused a structural break in the economy. Second, the impulse response analysis reveals that an expansionary policy has a temporary, positive effect on financial and real economic variables. However, the inflation rate does not increase to a statistically significant level from zero. Third, market participants' expectation of a devaluation of the yen occurs in advance of an actual increase in the monetary base. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This paper classifies 175 countries over a period of just 30 years according to the balance of payments stages that are frequently used in proposing a hypothesis that the stage depends on the progression in a nation's development. Using a nonparametric estimation, this investigation demonstrates that a nation's stage in the balance of payments has a non-monotonic relationship with its economic development and that a country at the stage of immature creditor-lender enjoys a higher GDP per capita than at any other stage in its development. Another notable finding is that a lending country produces about twice the GDP per capita that a borrowing one does and that about 25% of countries in the world lend money to the rest of the world in nearly every year.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why the choice of invoice currency under exchange rate uncertainty depends not only on expectations but also on history. The analysis is motivated by the fact that the US dollar has historically been the dominant vehicle currency in developing countries. The theoretical analysis is based on an open economy model of monopolistic competition. When the market is competitive enough, the exporting firms tend to set their prices not to deviate from those of the competitors. As a result, a coordination failure can lead the third currency to be a less efficient equilibrium invoice currency. The role of expectations is important in selecting the equilibrium in the static framework. However, in the dynamic model with staggered price-setting, the role of history becomes another key determinant of the equilibrium currency pricing. The role of history may dominate the role of expectations when the firms are myopic, particularly in the competitive local market. It also becomes dominant in the staggered price setting when a fraction of the new price setters are backward-looking. The result suggests the importance of history in explaining why the firm tends to choose the US dollar as vehicle currency.

Fall 2005

This paper examines the behavior of liquidity-constrained firms in a time-series. It illustrates that cash-shortage expectations induce a firm to hold liquid assets, which reveal a nonlinear relationship with the degree of financing constraints. This paper also argues that financial constraints could create serial correlation in a firm's internal funds even if exogenous shocks last for a single period of time. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper examines the determinants of trade credit in Japanese manufacturing companies. The empirical analysis presents evidence that the volume of trade credit is influenced not only by transactional factors hut also by financial positions. The empirical test reveals that firms' future business prospects affect the volume of trade credit. Notably, for small firms whose liquidity is constrained, nontransactional factors such as an increase in cash Row reduce the need for trade credit. This paper also finds that trade payables act as a complement to bank loans. The quantitative relationship between trade payables and bank loans suggests that when monetary policy works in the financial markets, it also influences the trade-related credit markets.