An extensive analysis on the Japanese markets via S. Taylor's model

Applying S. Taylor's approach (1986), we make an extensive analysis on the Japanese stock market, foreign exchange market and the Japanese Government Bond Futures market. The purpose of this paper is to empirically reveal the structure of the Japanese markets via Taylor's model rather than to propose a new model. For this reason, we include a variety of analyzed data particularly for the Japanese stock market and the foreign exchange market because the results can be used in a different manner. The paper consists of three parts. But each part can be read separately. Part 1: Overshooting hypothesis for Japanese stock prices Part 2: A trend movement in daily/weekly Yen-Dollar exchange rates Part 3: Price variations of Japanese Government Futures. In the first part, the stock prices are shown to over-respond to new information, which is different from the behaviors of stock prices in other markets. In Part 2, a trend movement is revealed in Yen-Dollar exchange rates. In Part 3, a strategy in the Japanese Government Bond futures markets is shown to perform better than a buy and hold strategy.     

Fixed-term contracts as a source of labour demand fluctuations

Employment fluctuations are one of the central issues in the business cycle literature. The fluctuations depend crucially not only on the economic conditions but also on the labour market institutions. Since most previous studies have assumed indefinite-term contracts (ITC) implicitly, the implications of fixed-term contracts (FTC) on dynamic labour demand have been rather overlooked. This article investigates dynamic labour demand of a firm with FTC to show that the employment fluctuations under FTC can be totally different from those under ITC. In particular, a productivity shock that takes place at a future date generates the current fluctuations in employment under FTC, while it does not under ITC.