Monetary and Fiscal Policy in a Liquidity Trap: The Japanese Experience 1999-2004

We characterize monetary and fiscal policy rules to implement optimal responses to a substantial decline in the natural rate of interest, and compare them with policy decisions made by the Japanese central bank and government in 1999-2004. First, we find that the Bank of Japan's policy commitment to continuing monetary easing until some prespecified conditions are satisfied lacks history dependence, a key feature of the optimal monetary policy rule. Second, the term structure of the interest rate gap (the spread between the actual real interest rate and its natural rate counterpart) was not downward sloping, indicating that the Bank of Japan's commitment failed to have suffcient influence on the market's expectations about the future course of monetary policy. Third, we find that the primary surplus in 1999-2002 was higher than predicted by the historical regularity, implying that the Japanese government deviated from the Ricardian rule toward fiscal tightening. These findings suggest that inappropriate conduct of monetary and fiscal policy during this period delayed the timing to escape from the liquidity trap.

Do Larger Firms Have More Interfirm Relationships?

In this study, we investigate interfirm networks by employing a unique dataset containing information on more than 800,000 Japanese firms, about half of all corporate firms currently operating in Japan. First, we find that the number of relationships, measured by the indegree, has a fat-tail distribution, implying that there exist "hub" firms with a large number of relationships. Moreover, the indegree distribution for those hub firms also exhibits a fat tail, suggesting the existence of "super-hub" firms. Second, we find that larger firms tend to have more counterparts, but that the relationship between firms' size and the number of their counterparts is not necessarily proportional; firms that already have a large number of counterparts tend to grow without proportionately expanding it.

Coevolutionary genetic algorithm for constraint satisfaction with a genetic repair operator for effective schemata formation

We discuss a coevolutionary genetic algorithm for constraint satisfaction. Our basic idea is to explore effective genetic information in the population, i.e., schemata, and to exploit the genetic information in order to guide the population to better solutions. Our coevolutionary genetic algorithm (CGA) consists of two GA populations; the first GA, called “H-GA”, searches for the solutions in a given environment (problem), and the second GA, called “P-GA”, searches for effective genetic information involved in the H-GA, namely, good schemata. Thus, each individual in P-GA consists of alleles in H-GA or “don't care” symbol representing a schema in the H-GA. These GA populations separately evolve in each genetic space at different abstraction levels and affect with each other by two genetic operators: “superposition” and “transcription”. We then applied our CGA to constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) incorporating a new stochastic “repair” operator for P-GA to raise the consistency of schemata with the (local) constraint conditions in CSPs. We carried out two experiments: First, we examined the performance of CGA on various “general” CSPs that are generated randomly for a wide variety of “density” and “tightness” of constraint conditions in the CSPs that are the basic measures of characterizing CSPs. Next, we examined “structured” CSPs involving latent “cluster” structures among the variables in the CSPs. For these experiments, computer simulations confirmed us the effectiveness of our CGA</p

フザイ ノ シキュウ メアリー シェリー ノ フランケンシュタイン オ ヨム

The female characters of Mary Shelley\u27s Frankenstein play essentially the same role of a subservient and fall so vulnerably and innocently into the hands of the nameless creature,`Monster.\u27Such feminist critics as Moers,Poovey,Gilbert and Gubar,and Johnson, however, have shown that the male-dominance of the narrative and the monstrosity of the solitary heroes indicate that the consideration of relationship between and her text is very important to understand this seminal modern horror fully. This paper, drawing on the implicit metaphors of on two levels of story-telling and of story-told, offers a new reading of Frankenstein. The monstrosity of the Monster, Victor, and Mary will respectively be shown as a head-on collision of the direct but ambiguous opposites, such as Creator/ Creature,Father/ Son,Culture/ Nature,(Woman)Writer/(Her) Text, and others. By acting out into the story her deep-felt antagonism between being forced to be a and trying to be a ,Mary, like Frankenstein himself, became a progenitor of herself, the author of Frankenstein. Her Monster,in its widest sense, represents the transgression of Frankenstein. Her Monster, in its widest sense,represents the transgression of the boundary between the level of human genealogy/ of story-told and the meta-level of super-human genealogy/ of story-telling. Thus, ati the end of the novel,the Monster is relieved from Mary\u27s threefold narrative frame,to be her"hideous progeny"and"go forth and prosper" in this world of "Waking Dreams