NBER Publications by Tokuo Iwaisako

This paper provides an in-depth review and analysis of household portfolios in Japan. (1) Using both aggregate and disaggregate data, it is shown that the shares of equities in household financial wealth have been decreasing throughout the 1990s. Stock market participations of Japanese households also have declined in the last decade. This is in sharp contrast to the U.S. and European countries in which increasing trends in household stock holdings are observed. (2) Using survey data, age-related variation in stock shares in financial wealth is analyzed. Equity shares in financial wealth increases with age among young households, peaking in the fifties age group, then becoming constant. This peak comes in a much later stage of the life-cycle compared to other countries. Stock market partic...

This paper examines the stock and land price behaviors during the bubble economy period (the second half of the 1980s), paying considerable attention to the linkage of the two markets and the effects of monetary policy. In particular, we examine whether the booms in these asset prices can be justified by changes of the fundamental economic variables such as the interest rates or the growth of the real economy. A complex chain of events is needed to explain the process of asset price inflation and deflation. Our empirical results suggest (i) that the initial increases of asset prices are sown by a sharp increase in bank lending to real estate; (ii) that a considerable comovement between stock and land prices is consistent with a theory that emphasizes the relationship between the collate...