Tatsuyoshi Okimoto

Keio University · Faculty of Economics

This study examines the conditional capital surplus and shortfall dynamics of renewable and non-renewable resource firms. To this end, this study uses the systemic risk index by Brownlees and Engle (2017) and considers two conditional systemic events, namely, a stock market crash and a commodity price crash. The results indicate that generally, com...

This paper examines the spillover effects of unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) and the Federal Reserve (Fed) on the domestic and global financial markets, taking a possible regime change into account. Applying a smooth-transition global VAR model to ten countries and the Euro zone for the sample period between 2002–...

Predicting the future economy is of great interest to practitioners and policymakers. In this study, we confront this problem by examining the relationship between credit spread curves and future economic activity. To this end, we construct a monthly empirical distribution of credit spread curves by calculating credit spreads of corporate bonds at...

This study examines the effects of unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) by the major central banks, namely the Bank of England (BOE), Bank of Japan (BOJ), European Central Bank (ECB) and the Federal Reserve (Fed), on the international financial markets, taking global spillovers and monetary policy interaction into account. To this end, we applie...

This paper investigates the uncertainty-dependent and sign-dependent effects of the oil market fundamental shocks, namely supply, aggregate demand and oil-specific demand shocks. We do so by first proposing a novel oil uncertainty index that is measured by the stochastic volatility of the unpredictable component of oil prices. We then employ a nonl...

While recent studies based on factor models with no-arbitrage restrictions provide evidence of a positive correlation between the nominal interest rates and real activity, there are few dynamic general equilibrium models which can successfully explain this positive relationship. This paper provides a dynamic general equilibrium model that naturally...

Investment is an inherent component of business activities. However, what if firms invest more than they should? This study examines this phenomenon, which is dubbed as overinvestment, among resource firms as induced by the business cycle and macroeconomic uncertainties. The analysis is conducted using unbalanced panel data drawn from 584 resource...

Japan is the country with the longest history of implementing unconventional monetary policies, which were first introduced more than fifteen years ago and have been expanded several times since then. This study attempts to assess the overall macroeconomic effects of Japan's unconventional monetary policies based on a stylized block‐recursive vecto...

This paper examines changes in the effects of unconventional monetary policies in the United States. To this end, we estimate a Markov‐switching VAR model with absorbing regimes to capture possible structural changes. Our results detect regime changes around the beginning of 2011 and the middle of 2013. Before 2011, the U.S. large‐scale asset purch...

We introduce an affine term structure model with observed macroeconomic factors for credit spread curves under the unconventional monetary policy regime in Japan. Empirical results based on the model selection using Japanese data demonstrate that the credit spread curves are dominated by the monetary policy and suggest that global economic forces,...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the asymmetric reactions of the US natural gas market and US economy to its market fundamental shocks. We find that results based on a smooth transition vector autoregressive (STVAR) model provides a plausible and robust explanation to the behavior of the US natural gas market, which asymmetrically reac...

This paper examines the dynamics of trend inflation in Japan over the last three decades based on the smooth transition Phillips curve model. We find that there is a strong connection between the trend inflation and monetary policy regimes. The results also suggest that the introduction of the inflation targeting policy and quantitative and qualita...

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...

This paper investigates the uncertainty-dependent and sign-dependent effects of the oil market fundamental shocks, namely supply, aggregate demand and oil-specific demand shocks. We do so by first proposing a novel oil uncertainty index that is measured by the stochastic volatility of the unpredictable component of oil prices. Second, we employ a n...

Japan is the country with the longest history of implementing unconventional monetary policies, which were first introduced more than fifteen years ago and have since been expanded several times. This study attempts to assess the overall macroeconomic effects of Japan’s unconventional monetary policies based on a stylized block-recursive vector aut...

This paper investigates the dynamics of integration in East Asian equity markets between 1995 and 2013 using a smooth-transition correlation GARCH model. Our results show that East Asian equity market integration among China and other countries has increased significantly since 2007, whereas among other East Asian equity markets excluding China inc...

This paper investigates the usefulness of the term structure of credit spreads to predict the business cycle in Japan. Our analyses provide clear evidence that the term structure of credit spreads has more predictive power than the government bond yield. Specifically, the paper shows that the credit spread curve of medium-grade corporate bonds has...

Japanese government debt is at unprecedented levels with a gross debt to gross domestic product ratio of over 230 per cent and a net debt to gross domestic product ratio of 150 per cent. There are three big challenges to fiscal sustainability: the huge amount of government bonds outstanding; continued budget deficits; and the growing age-related sp...

We investigate how the excess comovement of commodity prices, that is, the correlation in commodity returns after filtering out common fundamental shocks, has changed over the past three decades by developing the smooth-transition dynamic conditional correlation model that can capture long-run trends and short-run dynamics of correlation simultaneo...

We investigate how the excess comovement of commodity prices, that is, the correlation in commodity returns after filtering out common fundamental shocks, has changed over the past three decades by developing the smooth-transition dynamic conditional correlation model that can capture long-run trends and short-run dynamics of correlation simultaneo...

Previous studies document the existence of long-run trends in comovements in the stock and bond markets. Following these findings, this article examines possible trends in stock-bond return correlations. To this end, we introduce a trend component into a smooth transition regression (STR) model including the multiple transition variables of Aslanid...

This paper investigates asymmetric increasing trends in dependence in major international equity markets. To this end, we develop a multiple-regime smooth-transition copula GARCH model and address several important questions, including the number of regimes and the existence of increasing asymmetric trends in dependence. Our results suggest that tw...

This paper proposes a modified quasi-likelihood test of Markov regime switching models. Despite its popularity in economics and finance, there are few papers that develop tests for regime switching models. Recently, Cho and White (2007) derive the asymptotic distribution of the quasi-likelihood ratio (QLR) statistic of Markov regime switching model...

This paper investigates asymmetric increasing trends in dependence in major international equity markets. To this end, we develop a multiple-regime smooth-transition copula GARCH model and address several important questions, including the number of regimes and the existence of increasing asymmetric trends in dependence. Our results suggest that tw...

In this paper, we analyze the relationships among oil prices, clean energy stock prices, and technology stock prices, endogenously controlling for structural changes in the market. To this end, we apply Markov-switching vector autoregressive models to the economic system consisting of oil prices, clean energy and technology stock prices, and intere...

We investigate how the excess comovement of commodity prices, that is, the correlation in commodity returns after filtering out common fundamental shocks, has changed over the past three decades by developing the smooth-transition dynamic conditional correlation model that can capture long-run trends and short-run dynamics of correlation simultaneo...

The question of whether more Socially Responsible (SR) firms outperform or underperform other conventional firms has been debated in the economic literature. In this study, using the Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) indexes and conventional stock indexes in the US, the UK and Japan, first and second moments of firm performance distributions ar...

We construct quarterly series of the revenues, expenditures, and debt outstanding for Japan from 1980 to 2010, and analyze the sustainability of the fiscal policy. We pursue three approaches to examine the sustainability. First, we calculate the minimum tax rate that stabilizes the debt to GDP ratio given the future government expenditures. Using 2...

This paper relates predictable gains from positions in fed funds futures contracts to violations of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates. Although evidence for predictable gains from positions in short-horizon contracts is mixed, we find that gains in longer horizon contracts can be well described using Markov-switchi...

This paper investigates the dynamics of international government bond market integration in six of the G7 economies over two decades leading up to the global crisis. It examines whether such integration had been significant; the extent to which integration at the short and long end of the yield curve differed; the nature of such integration; and th...

The paper investigates the possibility of decline in the persistence of real exchange rates, or deviations from PPP. To this end, we test the null hypothesis of no decline in the PPP deviation persistence between two subsamples using a fractional integration framework. The test rejects the null at the 10% significance level for nine out of 17 count...

This paper employs block recursive structural VAR models with Markov switching for modeling monetary policy and private sector behavior of the Japanese economy. By estimating the endogenous structural breaks, we investigate the existence, number, and nature of breaks possibly implied by the monetary policy adopted between 1975 and 2002. Results ind...

A number of recent studies found two asymmetries in dependence structures in international equity markets; specifically, dependence tends to be high in (1) highly volatile markets and (2) bear markets. In this paper, a further investigation on asymmetric dependence structures in international equity markets is performed under the use of the Markov...

Characteristics of inflation play a key role in policy formulation and market analysis. Several studies have analyzed inflation persistence and reached diverging conclusions. In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of inflation persistence using fractionally integrated processes and find that there has been a clear decline in inflation persisten...