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This paper scrutinizes the role of prolonged, expansionary monetary policy on the savings behavior of Japanese households, focusing on the dramatic change of the household savings rate since 1998, from high to low savings. The literature generally attributes this change to the country’s shift from high-growth to low-growth and its demographic change. This paper empirically examines changes in the incentives for saving and the ability to save connected to monetary policy. It finds that monetary policy had a significant impact on Japan’s household behavior via the interest rate channel and the redistribution channel but not the labor income channel. There is also evidence that rising wealth boosts savings.

This paper scrutinizes the role of prolonged, expansionary monetary policy on the savings behavior of Japanese households, focusing on the dramatic change of the household savings behavior since 1998, from high to low savings. Existing literature generally attributes this behavioral change to the country's shift from a high-growth to a low-growth economy and its demographic change. In contrast, this paper empirically examines changes in the incentives for saving and the ability to save connected to monetary policy. It finds that monetary policy has had a significant impact on Japan's household behavior via three channels: the interest rate channel, the redistribution channel, and the wealth channel.

This paper examines real wage effects of monetary policy in Japan, particularly during the past two decades of monetary easing. The literature generally attributes real wage trends to structural factors that influence the nominal wage components, such as the disappearance of downward nominal wage rigidity. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a theoretical framework for the transmission of monetary policy shocks to real wages, emphasizing the responsiveness of labor productivity growth to monetary expansion. Secondly, it alludes to the significance of real wage effects of monetary policy for optimal policy design.

The paper shows that currencies of countries with persistent current account surpluses and high foreign-currency denominated assets, such as the Swiss franc and the Japanese yen, are under persistent appreciation pressure, particularly when the centres of the world monetary system follow expansionary monetary policies. This limits the choice of exchange rate regime. Given flexible exchange rates, a negative risk premium on the domestic interest rate can emerge. Empirical estimations provide mixed evidence for a negative impact of net foreign asset positions and exchange rate uncertainty on interest rates of international creditor countries at the periphery of the world monetary system.

This paper examines whether the interest rate preferences of Federal Reserve Bank Presidents are subject to a regional bias. In order to evaluate the regional bias hypothesis, we augment individual Taylor rules for the Federal Reserve Bank Presidents (sample 1989 to 2006) with regional variables and test for their influence on the Presidents’ interest rate preferences. These preferences stem from FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) transcripts. Estimates based on the augmented Taylor rules reveal that the preferences of some Federal Reserve Bank Presidents were not free of a regional bias. Augmented Taylor rules with inertia, however, show that this finding could also be due to the presence of an interest rate smoothing motive.