Sufficiently high net worth of financial intermediaries (FIs) is considered a necessary condition for financial and macroeconomic stability. In this paper, we explore why the net worth of FIs is important as compared to that of nonfinancial firms using a dynamic general equilibrium model, in which both FIs and nonfinancial firms rely on costly external debt. We find that an exogenous disruption of the FIs' net worth has a greater aggregate impact than does the same-sized disruption of the nonfinancial firms' net worth. The key reason is that the net worth of the FIs in the United States is small.

In this paper we document the main features of the distributions of wages, earnings, consumption and wealth in Japan since the early 1980s using four main data sources: the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (NSFIE) and the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (JPSC). We present an empirical analysis of inequality that specifically considers the path from individual wages and earnings, to household earnings, after-tax income, and finally consumption. We find that household earnings inequality rose substantially over this period. Inequality in disposable income and in consumption also rose over this period but to a lesser extent, suggesting taxes and transfers as well as insurance channels available to households help to insulate household consumption from shocks to wages. We find the same pattern in inequality trends when we look over the life cycle of households as we do over time in the economy. Additionally we find that there are notable differences in the inequality trends for wages and hours between men and women over this period.

The comovement of output across the sector producing nondurables (i.e., nondurable goods and services) and the sector producing durables is well established in the monetary business cycle literature. However, standard sticky‐price models that incorporate sectoral heterogeneity in price stickiness (i.e., sticky nondurables prices and flexible durables prices) cannot generate this feature. We argue that an input–output (I–O) structure provides a solution to this problem. Here, we develop a two‐sector model with an I–O structure, which is calibrated to the U.S. economy. In the model, each sector’s output affects those of the others by acting as an intermediate input. This connection between the sectors provides a channel through which sectoral comovement is induced.

There is ample empirical evidence suggesting that adverse shocks to the …nan-cial intermediary (FI) sector cause large economic downturns. The quantitative signi…cance of these shocks to the U.S. business cycle, however, has not been studied much so far. To evaluate the importance of these shocks, we estimate the stickyprice dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that incorporates the credit market imperfection associated with FIs. In this model, …nancial intermediaries (FIs), along with entrepreneurs, are credit constrained, and shocks to their net worth cause aggregate ‡uctuations through the …nancial accelerator mechanism. Using Bayesian estimation, we extract the shocks to the FIs'net worth. We …nd these e¤ects to be persistent, lowering economic activity for several quarters after the recessionary trough. According to variance decomposition, the shocks to the FI sector account for at least 10% of investment variation, but have a relatively minor in ‡uence on the variations in output and in ‡ation. During the …nancial crisis starting in 2007, shocks account for 24% of the decline in investment, 10% of the decline in output and 20% of the decline in in ‡ation.

In this paper, we decompose oil price changes into their component parts following Kilian (2009) and estimate the dynamic effects of each component on industry-level production and prices in the U.S. and Japan using identified VAR models. The way oil price changes affect each industry depends on what kind of underlying shock drives oil price changes as well as on industry characteristics. Unexpected disruptions of oil supply act mainly as negative supply shocks for oil-intensive industries and act mainly as negative demand shocks for less oil-intensive industries. For most industries in the U.S., shocks to the global demand for all industrial commodities act mainly as positive demand shocks, and demand shocks that are specific to the global oil market act mainly as negative supply shocks. In Japan, the oil-specific demand shocks as well as the global demand shocks act mainly as positive demand shocks for many industries.