Published papers

How are Asian financial markets interlinked and how are they linked to markets in developed countries? What is the main driver of fluctuations in Asian financial markets as well as real economic activity? To answer these questions, we estimate the spillover index proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz and gauge the degree of interaction in both financial markets and real economic activity among Asian economies. We first show that the degree of the international spillover in stock markets is uniform, irrespective of the groups of countries concerned, such as the G3 and ASEAN4. This suggests the importance of global common shocks in stock markets. We then discuss the macro-finance dissonance. In stock and bond markets, the United States has been the main driver of fluctuations. However, China has emerged as an important source of fluctuations in real economic activity.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between real exchange rate dynamics and financial market imperfections. For this purpose, we first construct a New Open Economy Macroeconomics (NOEM) model that incorporates staggered loan contracts as a simple form of the financial market imperfections. Our model with such a financial market friction replicates persistent, volatile, and realistic hump-shaped responses of real exchange rates, which have been thought very difficult to materialize in standard NOEM models. Remarkably, these realistic responses can materialize even with both supply and demand shocks, such as cost-push, loan rate, and monetary policy shocks. This implies that the financial market development is a key element for understanding real exchange rate dynamics.

Recently, several researchers have succeeded in producing expectation-driven cycles by balancing the tension between the wealth effect and the substitution effect stemming from the higher expected future productivity. Especially, seminal research by Christiano et al. ("Monetary Policy and Stock Market Boom-Bust Cycles", mimeo, Northwestern University, 2007), explains "stock market boom-bust cycles", characterized by increases in consumption, labor inputs, investment, and stock prices relating to high expected future technology levels. We, however, show that such expectation-driven cycles are difficult to generate based on "growth expectation", which reflects expectations of higher productivity growth rates.

How should monetary policy cooperation be designed when more than one country is simultaneously facing zero lower bounds on nominal interest rates? To answer this question, we examine monetary policy cooperation with both optimal discretion and commitment policies in a two-country model. We reach the following conclusions. Under discretion, monetary policy cooperation is characterized by the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES), a key parameter measuring international spillovers, and no history dependency. On the other hand, under commitment, monetary policy featureshistory dependence with international spillover effects. © 2010 Bank of Japan.