Masanori Kashiwagi

This paper addresses the welfare consequences for a country issuing vehicle currency, in a standard two country dynamic general equilibrium model with price stickiness. Deriving optimal monetary policy rules and evaluating welfare under various assumptions regarding currencies for invoicing exports, this paper obtains analytical conditions under which use of vehicle currency in pricing exports actually benefits the vehicle currency country compared with a situation in which each country prices its exports in its own currency. Moreover, this paper numerically illustrates that there is a fairly broad parametrical range that leads to a case in which use of vehicle currency is preferred not only by the vehicle currency country, but also by the non-vehicle currency country. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper conducts quantile regressions and obtains detailed estimates of monetary policy rules in Japan using a sample that includes recent periods of zero interest rates. Taking into account censoring and endogeneity, we compute censored quantile instrumental variable estimators and compare them with estimates from uncensored quantile regressions. The estimation results indicate that not accounting for censoring of interest rates tends to result in downwardly biased estimates. Moreover, our censored quantile regressions lead to relatively flat coefficients of inflation and insignificant coefficients of the output gap over the conditional interest rate distribution, suggesting that monetary policy in Japan may be well described by a linear rule.

This paper examines the quantitative performance of the standard search and matching model in explaining the cyclical behaviour of Taiwan's labour market. Although the model accounts well for the data in some dimensions, simulated volatility is counterfactually very low, as pointed out in Shimer (2005) for the US labour market. Nevertheless, calibrated to Taiwan's data, the model explains a higher proportion of the observed volatility than the Shimer (2005) results, due to a higher parameter value for leisure; if an extremely high value is assumed, the model explains substantially better, but still partially, the volatility in Taiwan.

This paper presents a simple model of the rental and homeownership markets in a unified framework. The paper then investigates the model's positive and normative properties, applying ideas developed in search and matching theory. I analytically address the comparative static and welfare implications of the model. In addition, as an extension toward realism, I consider a version of the model with free entry of housing supply, while the benchmark model assumes exogenous housing supply. To examine the benchmark model's dynamics, I generate the impulse responses of house prices, rents, and housing occupancy patterns to an increase in housing supply and show that house prices react more than rents in the short run. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.