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In this study, we investigate the impact of monetary policy on Japanese household incomes using the Family Income and Expenditure Survey. Our analysis focuses on the savings and income structure of households, and covers the period from Q1 2007 to Q2 2021. We find that households in the highest income brackets have a higher proportion of their savings invested in stocks, while middle and lower income households hold a greater share of their savings in bank deposits. Our hypothesis is that the Bank of Japan's monetary policies have boosted stock markets in particular, leading to disproportionate benefits for high-income households through capital gains and dividends. Using local projections, we first identify a positive, lasting cumulative effect of both conventional and unconventional monetary expansion on Japanese stock markets. We then examine how stock market performance impacts household incomes, and find that the effect is strongest for high-income households, decreases for middle-income households, and disappears for lower-income households. Our results suggest that monetary policy may have contributed to the persistent growth in income inequality in Japan, as measured by metrics such as the Gini coefficient and top-to-bottom income ratios.

This paper analyzes the impact of monetary policy on household saving in Japan between 1993 and 2017. Using annual data from the Japan Panel Survey of Consumers it is shown that monetary expansion has contributed to a widening gap in households' net saving through an adverse effect on the volume of saving of non-academic households. In contrast, households with at least one academic tend to be able to compensate these adverse effects of monetary expansion or can even benefit from it. The paper documents how inequality in terms of the ability to build up wealth has increased in Japan over the past decades. The statistical analysis controls for household size as well as potential spatial effects in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy on household saving.

Since the 1980s inflationary pressures seem to materialize overproportionately outside of the sectors of consumer goods and services. We combine the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices with indices for asset prices, such as stocks and real estate, as well as the costs of public goods to develop alternative inflation measures in Germany since the introduction of the euro. Real economic growth as well as median wage developments are reexamined in light of the alternative inflation estimates. Both turn out to be negative over the past decade in the most pessimistic scenarios.