Japanese Economic Review最新文献

This paper argues that interactions of firms account for a sizable part of fluctuations in aggregate investments without exogenous aggregate shocks. We first establish empirically that the fraction of firms that engage in a lumpy investment follows a non-normal, two-sided exponential distribution across region-year with a panel data set of Italian firms. We then present a simple sectoral model that generates the two-sided exponential distribution that arises from the complementarity of the firms’ lumpy investments within a region. Calibrated by the firm-level estimate of complementarity, the model is capable of generating the two-sided exponential fluctuations observed at the aggregate level.

The paper explores the characteristics associated with the formation of bubbles that occurred in the Hong Kong stock market in 1997 and 2007, as well as the 2000 dot-com bubble of Nasdaq. It examines the profitability of technical analysis (TA) strategies generating buy and sell signals, with and without our proposed trading rules. The empirical results show that, by applying long and short strategies during the bubble formation and a short strategy after the bubble burst, it not only produces returns that are significantly greater than buy-and-hold strategies, but also produces greater wealth compared with TA strategies without trading rules. We conclude that these bubble detection signals help investors generate greater wealth from applying appropriate long and short moving average (MA) strategies.

No abstract is available for this article.

This paper develops some applications of asymptotic statistical decision theory in econometrics, focusing on settings where the data are organized into groups or cells with heterogeneous parameters. Even if the groups are of different sizes, local asymptotic normality holds under suitable regularity conditions, and this can greatly simplify analysis of different types of econometric problems. We apply these results to the analysis of treatment assignment rules, and to estimators of cell-specific parameters that employ shrinkage towards parametric models.

This paper constructs a tractable model of endogenous growth with financial frictions and firm heterogeneity. We introduce factor income tax, consumption tax as well as the government consumption into the base model and explore the growth effect of fiscal policy. We show that from the qualitative perspective, the long-run effects of fiscal actions in our model are similar to those obtained in the representative agent models. However, the quantitative impacts of fiscal policy on long-run growth in our setting can be substantially different from those established in the model where agents are homogeneous and there is no financial frictions.

This paper discusses the issue of model misspecification and model-free methods in dynamic panel data analysis. We primarily review existing results, but also provide several new results. When the dynamics are homogeneous, we show that several widely used estimators for panel first-order autoregressive AR(1) models converge to first-order autocorrelation, even under misspecification. Under heterogeneity, these estimators converge to the ratio of the means of the first-order autocovariances and variances. We also discuss the estimation of autocovariances, the estimation of panel AR(∞) models, and the estimation of the distribution of the heterogeneous mean and autocovariances.

We examine how intangible investments change the sources of growth in the Korean economy. After constructing a novel industry-level data set on intangibles, we estimate the contribution of intangible-intensive industries and other industries to aggregate productivity growth in 1981–2008. The contribution of intangible-intensive industries to aggregate labour productivity growth has significantly increased, whereas that of other industries has substantially decreased. The increased contribution of intangible-intensive industries is mainly associated with total factor productivity growth rather than with input growth. This suggests that innovations related to intangible investments in these industries might become a new key source of productivity growth in Korea.

Using the life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis, we theoretically and empirically assess the impact of child benefit payments on household wealth accumulation. Consistent with the predictions of the model, we find that higher cumulative benefits received increase current assets, higher future benefit payments lower asset holding, and that these effects systematically vary over the life cycle. We find different wealth responses to child benefit payments for liquidity constrained and unconstrained households, as predicted by the model.

We analyse the effects of public debt in a basic endogenous growth model with productive public spending. We demonstrate that a discretionary policy in general violates the intertemporal government budget constraint along a balanced growth path. A balanced government budget gives a unique saddle point stable growth path. With a rule-based policy, two saddle point stable balanced growth paths can occur, depending on the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of consumption and on the primary surplus policy. Higher debt goes along with smaller long-run growth and we derive a condition such that a deficit-financed increase in public spending raises the growth rate.