Working Less and Bargain Hunting More: Macroimplications of Sales during Japan's Lost Decades

Standard New Keynesian models have often neglected temporary sales. In this study, we ask whether this treatment is appropriate. We use Japanese scanner data covering the last two decades and find a negative correlation between the frequency of sales and hours worked. We then construct a model that takes households' decisions regarding their allocation of time for work, leisure, and bargain hunting into account. We show that the decline in hours worked explains the rise in the frequency of sales. The real effect of monetary policy shocks weakens by around 40% due to temporary sales, but monetary policy still matters.     

A New Method for Identifying the Effects of Foreign Exchange Interventions

Central banks react even to intraday changes in the exchange rate; however, in most cases, intervention data are available only at a daily frequency. This temporal aggregation makes it difficult to identify the effects of interventions on the exchange rate. We apply the Bayesian Markov‐chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to this endogeneity problem. We use “data augmentation” to obtain intraday intervention amounts and estimate the efficacy of interventions using the augmented data. Applying this new method to Japanese data, we find that an intervention of 1 trillion yen moves the yen/dollar rate by 1.8%, which is more than twice as much as the magnitude reported in previous studies applying ordinary least squares to daily observations. This shows the quantitative importance of the endogeneity problem due to temporal aggregation.     

Endogenous Cycles in Collateralized Credit

This paper presents a simple and tractable equilibrium model, where collateralized credit emerges under limited commitment. We show that even if there is no time variation in fundamentals, credit trade can fluctuate endogenously over time. In our theory, credit fragilities are associated with endogenous fluctuations in trade probabilities, collateral values, and lending volumes.     

QUANTILE FORECASTS OF FINANCIAL RETURNS USING REALIZED GARCH MODELS*

This article applies the realized generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model, which incorporates the GARCH model with realized volatility, to quantile forecasts of financial returns, such as Value‐at‐Risk and expected shortfall. Student's t‐ and skewed Student's t‐distributions as well as normal distribution are used for the return distribution. The main results for the S&P 500 stock index are: (i) the realized GARCH model with the skewed Student's t‐distribution performs better than that with the normal and Student's t‐distributions and the exponential GARCH model using the daily returns only; and (ii) using the realized kernel to take account of microstructure noise does not improve the performance.     

国有控股上市公司的控制权、金字塔式结构和侵占行为——来自中国股权分置改革的证据

文献认为,当上市公司的控制权和现金流出现分离时,会发生控股股东对上市公司的侵占,而这一分离会出现在二元股权或金字塔式的公司结构中。在中国,直到2005年实行股权分置改革之前,双类股和金字塔式的公司结构同时存在于上市公司。股权分置改革仅消除了二元股权结构,但金字塔式结构依然存在。通过对这一外生变化的研究,本文估计了控股股东利用金字塔式结构对上市公司进行侵占的规模。结果显示,控股权越大,现金流权越小,侵占的规模越大。同时,这种侵占在国有控股公司中更明显,在私人公司中并未出现。究其原因,虽然国有企业的现金流权高于私人企业,但国有公司的控股权比例也高于私人公司。股权分置改革削弱了控股股东的侵占能力,但分离仍然存在,而且依旧产生对小股东的侵占。结果显示,侵占的平均规模为总资产的7%～8%。如果实行一股一票原则,资产扩张会减少13%。     

ON THE NEUTRALITY OF COALITION FORMATION IN A PURE BARGAINING PROBLEM*

We consider the sequential bargaining game à la Stahl–Binmore–Rubinstein with random proposers, juxtaposing an ex ante coalition formation stage to their bargaining game. On the basis of the expected outcomes in the negotiation over how to split a dollar, players can form coalitions in a sequential manner, within each of which they can redistribute their payoffs. It turns out that the grand coalition does form, and that each player receives his discounted expected payoff, which is obtained by playing as a single player in the negotiation, although there could be many equilibria in the bargaining stage.