Kimie Harada

Chuo University · Faculty of Commerce

The Bank of Japan is the only central bank that holds enormous amounts of stocks of listed companies by purchasing ETFs via its unconventional monetary policy measures. The Bank of Japan has been buying ETFs for more than a decade and, seemingly, has no awareness that it has become a huge investor in the stock market. This article explains how this...

East Asia has experienced an unprecedented expansion in its wine market over the past two decades. This paper examines the extent to which import tariff reductions through bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) have contributed to an increase in wine imports to Japan, China, and South Korea. Our empirical method involves estimating an augmented ver...

This paper examines the impacts of the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) purchasing program that has been conducted since December 2010. The program is a part of the BOJ’s unconventional monetary policy and has accelerated since the introduction of the Quantitative and Qualitative Easing in April 2013. In this study, the influence...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the performances and consequences of Cooperative (Shinkin) bank merger activities that took place from 1994 through 2003 in Japan. Not only were there a large number of mergers, but these bank mergers were complicated during the sample period compared to another type of banking institutions. Banks are classi...

Statistics on the wine market in countries where it is not traditionally produced or consumed are estimates using simple methods. In northeast Asia those statistics are exaggerated for a combination of several reasons. One is a labelling issue: imported bulk wine is able to be added to domestically produced wine without the front label having to de...

First book on whole picture of wines of Japan issued from Japan to world readers We are observing people in the world to show their interest to wines of Japan. However only fragmental English information has been provided to the world so far. So, actual situation of wines of Japan characterized by rapidly improving quality of wines of Japan has not...

Purpose – This paper aims to understand Japan’s financial regulatory responses after the global financial crisis and recession. Japan’s post-crisis reactions show two seemingly opposing trends: collaboration with international organizations to strengthen the regulation to maintain financial stability, and regulatory forbearance for the banks with t...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test two agency-based hypotheses regarding the effect of ownership concentration on dividend policy using a large sample of Japanese firms. Design/methodology/approach – Level regressions associating payout rates to ownership concentration are run. Different measures of payout are used to ensure the robustn...

This paper examines the movements of the Distance to Default (DD), a market-based measure of corporate default risk, of eight failed Japanese banks in order to evaluate the predictive power of the DD measure for bank failures. The DD became smaller in anticipation of failure in many cases. The DD spread, defined as the DD of a failed bank minus the...

This paper studies the high frequency reaction of the Yen/Dollar exchange rate to announced macroeconomic information emanating from Japan and the U.S. We use data sampled at a five-minute frequency over a period from six years, from January 2001 to December 2006. We find that only announced surprises of the U.S. news produce impacts both on the co...

We examine the influence of ownership concentration on payout policy in Japan. According to the monitoring hypothesis, large shareholders prefer higher dividends to mitigate the agency cost of free cash flows. In contrast, the rent extraction hypothesis assumes that large shareholders derive private benefits of control and have therefore a preferen...

This paper applied the distance to default (DD) measure to five mergers among large Japanese banks during the crisis period. The DD helps us analyze whether mergers that took place in the late 1990s and 2000s made the merged banks financially more robust, as intended. Our findings include: (1) A merged bank fundamentally inherits financial soundnes...

We examine the dividend policy of Japanese firms and find that dividend payout is negatively related to ownership concentration. This result contradicts the argument that dividends are substitute for shareholder monitoring, but supports the assumption that controlling shareholders extract private benefits at the expense of minority shareholders. Co...

This paper examines the effects of the Bank of Japan's (BOJ) intervention on the volatility as well as the level of the yen/dollar exchange rate. Specifically, the conventional GARCH model proposed by Bollerslev [Bollerslev, T., 1986. Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity. J. Econometrics 31, 307–327] and the component GARCH mod...

This paper investigates how financial weakness among Japanese banks in the second half of the 1990s was reflected in pricing in the financial markets. Two indicators, the Japan premium (JP) and the stock price spread (SP)-deviation between the bank stock index (BINDEX) and stock price index excluding banks (NINDEX)-were examined. The structural cha...

This paper examines the relationship between dividend adjustments, and subsequent operating performance and long-term stock returns for a large sample of Japanese firms. Its most distinct contribution is to take into account the conditions under which the adjustments take place using a predictive model of dividend changes. A more significant associ...

This paper examines the soundness of the Indonesian banking sector by describing its transition and current status. In particular, we focus on the government-led bank consolidation after the Asian currency crisis and provide a qualitative prospect of the role of the consolidation in bank restructuring. On that basis, we estimate a nonparameric fron...

We use Keiretsu affiliation to analyze the dividend policy of Japanese firms. Assuming that Keiretsu membership provides monitoring benefits and reduces information asymmetries between managers and investors, we test (1) whether dividend changes are more sensitive to growth opportunities for Keiretsu affiliates and (2) whether dividend increases ar...

This paper compares different indicators of bank fragility in order to examine which indicator most representatively reflects the financial health of Japanese banks. Japan premium has been a popular proxy for Japanese bank fragility since the 1997 banking crisis in the literature. However, during the 2001-2003 period when Japanese banks suffered an...

This paper investigates whether an increase in ABS issuance, or securitized products, by leasing companies has been influenced by Japanese banks’ tightened lending attitudes in 1990s. Our focus is in particular to examine the importance of asset securitization for leasing companies when bank lending is decreased. Leasing companies have been major...

First preliminary draft, November 2003, Tokyo/Frankfurt am Main The views expressed in this paper do not reflect in any way the official views of the European Central Bank

This paper investigates movements of market indicators of banking fragility, namely, Japan premium, stock prices, and credit derivative spreads of Japanese banks. Although the Japan premium in the euro-dollar market seemed to have virtually disappeared since April 1999, credit and default risks of Japanese banks has not necessarily disappeared. Oth...