Published papers

This study examines the conditional capital surplus and shortfall dynamics of renewable and non-renewable resource firms. To this end, this study uses the systemic risk index by Brownlees and Engle (2017) and considers two conditional systemic events, namely, a stock market crash and a commodity price crash. The results indicate that generally, companies in the resource sector tend to have conditional capital shortfall before 2000 and conditional capital surplus after 2000 owing to the boom of the commodity sector stocks and moderate capital structure management adopted by these companies. This finding is especially valid for resource firms in developed countries, whose observations dominate the dataset used in this study. Furthermore, the analysis using the panel vector autoregressive model indicates a positive influence of commodity price and geopolitical uncertainties on the conditional capital shortfall. These uncertainties have also been proven to increase the conditional failure probability of resource firms in the sample. Lastly, the performance analysis shows that potential capital shortfall is positively related to market returns, reflecting a high-risk high-return trade-off for the resource sector.

This paper examines the spillover effects of unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) and the Federal Reserve (Fed) on the domestic and global financial markets, taking a possible regime change into account. Applying a smooth-transition global VAR model to ten countries and the Euro zone for the sample period between 2002–2015, we find that the BOJ’s expansionary UMPs have significantly increased the equity prices and depreciated the exchange rates, regardless of the regimes. Also, our results indicate that the BOJ’s UMPs have become more effective for the government and corporate bond prices in more recent years. In addition, we find that the Fed’s expansionary UMPs have had significant positive effects on their domestic financial markets throughout the sample period. Finally, our results suggest that the BOJ’s UMPs have rather limited effects on global financial markets and that the effects of the Fed’s UMPs are considerably larger.

This study examines the effects of unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) by the major central banks, namely the Bank of England (BOE), Bank of Japan (BOJ), European Central Bank (ECB) and the Federal Reserve (Fed), on the international financial markets, taking global spillovers and monetary policy interaction into account. To this end, we applied the Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) model to 35 countries/economies and one region for the period from March 2009 to July 2019. In addition, we accommodated the smooth transition to the GVAR to consider possible structural changes in the effects of UMPs and monetary policy interaction. Our results indicate the importance of capturing structural changes, showing the remarkable difference between the beginning and end of the sample. For example, we found clear evidence of monetary policy coordination after the global financial crisis and less evidence of policy interaction in the recent period. Also, our results suggest that generally, the UMPs of the major central banks had stronger effects on both domestic and international bond markets in the earlier period. In contrast, the global equity markets responded more positively to the UMPs in the recent period, although there was no noticeable difference in the responses of domestic equity markets throughout the sample.

Investment is an inherent component of business activities. However, what if firms invest more than they should? This study examines this phenomenon, which is dubbed as overinvestment, among resource firms as induced by the business cycle and macroeconomic uncertainties. The analysis is conducted using unbalanced panel data drawn from 584 resource companies across 32 countries covering 1986 to 2017 in four resource sectors: (1) alternative energy, (2) forestry and paper, (3) mining, and (4) oil and gas producers. The results indicate that the forestry and paper sector overinvests relative to the standard investment level predicted by the investment function regardless of the sample period, while the alternative energy sector tends to underinvest. Also, many emerging economies, including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Korea, are found to have overinvested over the last three decades or so. In addition, the results suggest that commodity price inflation plays a more important role in inducing firms’ overinvestment than commodity price uncertainty. It is also found that the home country's business cycle significantly affects overinvestment, with the sign alternating from negative to positive after the global financial crisis. Furthermore, the finding also shows no significant relationship between global geopolitical risk and overinvestment but a significantly positive relationship is found between global economic and country-level governance policy uncertainties and overinvestment. Lastly, the results suggest that the effect of overinvestment on firm performance after three years is positive, especially for firms in the mining sector.

This paper examines the impacts of the Bank of Japan's (BOJ) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) purchasing program that has been conducted since December 2010. The program is a part of the BOJ's unconventional monetary policy and has accelerated since the introduction of the Quantitative and Qualitative Easing in April 2013. In this study, the influence of underlying stocks is assessed by comparing the performance of the stocks (those included in the Nikkei 225 and others) using a difference-in-difference analysis. We also separate morning and afternoon returns to control for the fact that the BOJ tends to purchase ETFs when performance of the stock market is weak in the morning session. We find that the Nikkei 225 component stocks' afternoon returns are significantly higher than those of non-Nikkei 225 stocks when the BOJ purchases ETFs. In addition, the subsample analysis demonstrates that the impact on Nikkei 225 stock returns becomes smaller over time despite the growing purchase amounts. Overall, our results indicate that the cumulative treatment effects on the Nikkei 225 are around 20% as of October 2017.

Predicting the future economy is of great interest to practitioners and policymakers. In this study, we confront this problem by examining the relationship between credit spread curves and future economic activity. To this end, we construct a monthly empirical distribution of credit spread curves by calculating credit spreads of corporate bonds at the firm level in Japan and examine whether it can be used to predict a Japanese business cycle. We find that the credit spread curve information in higher deciles (implying lower credit quality) provides more predictive power for the future economy than the information of government bond yield curve or the credit spread index suggested by previous studies. In addition, the smooth-transition predictive regression analysis demonstrates that credit spread curves have more predictive power under the low uncertainty regime, and depict a significant predictive power for a short horizon for both regimes. Finally, our component-wise analysis shows that the credit spread curve information has robust predictive power for producer-side indicators under the low uncertainty regime and for labor market conditions, regardless of the regime.

While recent studies based on factor models with no-arbitrage restrictions provide evidence of a positive correlation between the nominal interest rates and real activity, there are few dynamic general equilibrium models which can successfully explain this positive relationship. This paper provides a dynamic general equilibrium model that naturally generates a positive correlation between the nominal interest rates and excess consumption. To this end, we focus on the partial observability of economic variables in a pure exchange economy and derive a closed form solution for two-factor affine term structure model. Our empirical analysis based on the results indeed indicates the positive correlation between the nominal interest rates and excess consumption. Moreover, the time series of the model-implied nominal yield captures many of the short- and long-run fluctuations in the actual data.

This paper investigates the uncertainty-dependent and sign-dependent effects of the oil market fundamental shocks, namely supply, aggregate demand and oil-specific demand shocks. We do so by first proposing a novel oil uncertainty index that is measured by the stochastic volatility of the unpredictable component of oil prices. We then employ a nonlinear model and find that the all reactions of oil production, real price of oil, and global economic activity to the structural shocks are regime-dependent. Moreover, we extend the model to accommodate positive and negative oil market shocks to examine the possible asymmetric effects. In relation to real economic activity, the effects of oil supply shocks are asymmetric regardless of the state of the market, but oil-specific demand shocks are only asymmetric when oil price uncertainty is high.

This paper examines and compares the performance of the Japan Empowering Women Index (WIN), Japan ESG Select Leaders Index (SLI), and their parent, the Japanese Investable Market Index (IMI) using data from April 2013 to October 2020. Without regime switching, our benchmark analysis suggests that none of the indexes outperforms the market on average. We also investigate the possible regime-dependent performance of each index to identify the periods when WIN outperforms the market, the IMI, and the SLI, if ever. Our results indicate regime-dependent performance of the WIN and IMI and regime-independent performance of the SLI. For example, when the market performance of the previous month is relatively poor, the WIN tends to outperform the market, while the IMI tends to underperform. Our results also show that, when the market volatility of the previous month is relatively small, the WIN outperforms the market. However, the WIN and IMI tend to underperform the market under the high market volatility regime.