Monetary Policy in Japan, Germany and the United States: Does One Size Fit All?

We study the post-war evidence for Japan to see if the same specification for both the economy and the monetary policy rule is useful for understanding Japan's economy and monetary policy. A recurrent theme in the literature on Japanese monetary policy is that there are significant differences in both the policy procedures and objectives as compared to other industrial countries. In this paper we propose an out of sample' test of a set of restrictions on a vector autoregression employed by Clarida and Gertler (1997) in their analysis of the Bundesbank's behavior. Our interpretation of the evidence is that, with minor adjustments, the same specification provides a useful framework for understanding monetary policy in Japan. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that the Bank of Japan appears to react to inflation over longer forecast horizons as compared to other central banks.