No abstract

Despite the downward trend of land prices and the ex-post low return on real estate loans, Japanese banks increased their lending to the real estate sector during the 1990s. We argue that this phenomenon can be explained by the risk-shifting incentives of banks and discover that banks with low capital-to-asset ratios and low franchise value chose high-risk assets such as real estate loans. Unlike previous studies, we show that the capital-risk relationship is nonlinear and changes from positive to negative as franchise value falls. We also …nd that a capital adequacy requirement did not prevent risk-taking behavior of undercapitalized banks since they then just issued more subordinated debts to meet this requirement. In contrast, government capital injections led banks to reduce risky loans at the margin. Recapitalization by issuing subordinated debts helped banks recover their capital losses and mitigated the credit crunch, but consequently allowed them to increase their exposure to the real estate sector and worsened the bad loan problems.

The "Quantitative and Qualitative Monetary Easing" enacted immediately after the inauguration of the Bank of Japan Governor Kuroda brought violent fluctuations in the prices of government bonds and deteriorated market liquidity. Does a central bank's government bond purchasing policy generally reduce market liquidity? Do conditions exist that can prevent this decrease? This study analyzes how the Bank of Japan's purchasing policy changes influenced market liquidity. The results revealed that three specific policy changes contributed significantly to improving market liquidity: 1) increased purchasing frequency; 2) a decrease in the purchase amount per transaction; and 3) a reduced variability in the purchase amounts. These policy changes facilitated investors' purchase schedule expectations and helped reduce market uncertainty. The evidence supports the theory that the effect of government bond purchasing policy on market liquidity depends on the market's informational environment.

This paper investigates stock market contagion between U.S. and Asian markets. To distinguish between contagion and fundamentals-based stock price comovement, we use NYSE-traded stocks issued by Asian firms. Among the results, first we find that the empirical results show significant bilateral contagion effects in returns and return volatility. Second, contagion effects from U.S. market to Asian markets are stronger than in the reverse direction, indicating that the U.S. market plays a major role in the transmission of information to foreign markets. Third, the intensity of contagion was significantly greater during the Asian financial crisis than after the crisis.JEL classification: F37, G15.

The informational efficiency of the yen/dollar exchange rate is investigated in five market segments within each business day from 1987 to 2007. Among the results, we first find that the daily exchange rate has a cointegrating relationship with the cumulative price change of the segment for which the London and New York (NY) markets are both open, but not with that of any other segments. Second, the cumulative price change of the London/NY segment is the most persistent among the five market segments in the medium and long run. These results suggest that the greatest concentration of informed traders is in the London/NY segment, where intraday transactions are the highest. This is consistent with the theoretical prediction by Admati and Pfleiderer (1988) that prices are more informative when trading volume is heavier.