Published papers

In this paper, we first construct a dynamic new Keynesian model that incorporates life-cycle behavior a la Gertler [1999. Government debt and social security in a life-cycle economy. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 50, 61-110], in order to study whether structural shocks to the economy have asymmetric effects on heterogeneous agents, namely workers and retirees. We also examine whether considerations of life-cycle and demographic structure alter the dynamic properties of the monetary business cycle model, specifically the degree of amplification in impulse responses. According to our simulation results, shocks indeed have asymmetric impacts on different households and the demographic structure does alter the size of responses against shocks by changing the trade-off between substitution and income effects.

In this paper, to study the alternative monetary transmission mechanism to the traditional interest rate channel which may even work under zero nominal interest rates, we estimate the monetary business cycle model of the Japanese economy that incorporates the direct role of money. Estimation is conducted on the system of equations in a state-space form via maximum likelihood estimation. We, however, find that the direct effect of money is extremely small in Japan. This finding is the same as those obtained for the U.S. in Ireland [Ireland, P., 2004. Money's role in the monetary business cycle. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 36, 969-984] and the Euro area in Andres et al. [Andres, J., Lopez-Salido, D., Valles, J., 2001. Money in an Estimated Business Cycle Model of the Euro area. Working Paper 121, Bank of Spain].

In this paper, we summarize the findings from zero-interest-bound simulation exercises conducted on the policy/forecasting models of the three major central banks. After imposing a fixed-period zero-interest-bound episode on each model, we consider common variations in the monetary-policy reaction function to minimize the macro-economic consequences of such a deflationary regime. Although there is some heterogeneity in the ranking of these remedial policies, reflecting the different properties of the models, we find that more aggressive policy rules and price-targeting rules are potentially candidates for robust monetary strategies. J. Japanese Int. Economies 20 (3) (2006) 305-313.