Exploring the literature on the Japanese stagnation in the nineties: a business-cycle-accounting approach

• Author(s): Cunha, Gustavo ; Costa, Luís F.
• Date: 2013
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/30172
• Origin: Repositório da UTL
• Subject(s): Business Cycles; Stagnation; Japan
• Document Type: Journal article
• Language: English
• Contributor(s): Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa

Description

In this article we analyse the vast literature advancing explanations for the Japanese stagnation of the 1990s, using the Business-Cycle-Accounting approach proposed by V. Chari, P. Kehoe, and E. McGrattan. This methodology allows us to identify the most (and the least) promising types of explanations using the empirical evidence available. We find that capital-market frictions and total factor productivity fluctuations explain most of the variability observed in the data, and labour-market frictions do not play a significant role