Dual labor market and the "Phillips curve puzzle": the Japanese experience.

Low inflation was once welcomed by both policymakers and the public. However, Japan's experience during the 1990s changed the consensus of economists and central banks around the world regarding prices. Facing deflation and the zero-interest bound at the same time, the Bank of Japan had difficulty conducting an effective monetary policy, making Japan's stagnation unusually prolonged. The too-low inflation that concerns central banks today translates into the "Phillips curve puzzle." In the United States and Japan, in the course of the recovery from the Great Recession after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the unemployment rate had steadily declined to a level commonly regarded as lower than the natural rate or NAIRU. However, inflation remained low. In this paper, we consider a minimal model of the dual labor market to jointly investigate how the different factors affecting the structural evolution of the labor market have contributed to the observed flattening of the Phillips curve. We find that the level of bargaining power of workers, elasticity of the supply of labor to wage in the secondary market, and composition of the workforce are the main factors jointly explaining the evidence for Japan. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00191-022-00781-8.

Cryptoasset networks: Flows and regular players in Bitcoin and XRP.

Cryptoassets flow among players as recorded in the ledger of blockchain for all the transactions, comprising a network of players as nodes and flows as edges. The last decade, on the other hand, has witnessed repeating bubbles and crashes of the price of cryptoassets in exchange markets with fiat currencies and other cryptos. We study the relationship between these two important aspects of dynamics, one in the bubble/crash of price and the other in the daily network of crypto, by investigating Bitcoin and XRP. We focus on "regular players" who frequently appear on a weekly basis during a period of time including bubble/crash, and quantify each player's role with respect to outgoing and incoming flows by defining flow-weighted frequency. During the most significant period of one-year starting from the winter of 2017, we discovered the structure of three groups of players in the diagram of flow-weighted frequency, which is common to Bitcoin and XRP in spite of the different nature of the two cryptos. By examining the identity and business activity of some regular players in the case of Bitcoin, we can observe different roles of them, namely the players balancing surplus and deficit of cryptoassets (Bal-branch), those accumulating the cryptoassets (In-branch), and those reducing it (Out-branch). Using this information, we found that the regime switching among Bal-, In-, Out-branches was presumably brought about by the regular players who are not necessarily dominant and stable in the case of Bitcoin, while such players are simply absent in the case of XRP. We further discuss how one can understand the temporal transitions among the three branches.

Correction: Untangling the complexity of market competition in consumer goods - A complex Hilbert PCA analysis.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245531.].

Untangling the complexity of market competition in consumer goods-A complex Hilbert PCA analysis.

Today's consumer goods markets are rapidly evolving with significant growth in the number of information media as well as the number of competitive products. In this environment, obtaining a quantitative grasp of heterogeneous interactions of firms and customers, which have attracted interest of management scientists and economists, requires the analysis of extremely high-dimensional data. Existing approaches in quantitative research could not handle such data without any reliable prior knowledge nor strong assumptions. Alternatively, we propose a novel method called complex Hilbert principal component analysis (CHPCA) and construct a synchronization network using Hodge decomposition. CHPCA enables us to extract significant comovements with a time lead/delay in the data, and Hodge decomposition is useful for identifying the time-structure of correlations. We apply this method to the Japanese beer market data and reveal comovement of variables related to the consumer choice process across multiple products. Furthermore, we find remarkable customer heterogeneity by calculating the coordinates of each customer in the space derived from the results of CHPCA. Lastly, we discuss the policy and managerial implications, limitations, and further development of the proposed method.

Money flow network among firms' accounts in a regional bank of Japan.

In this study, we investigate the flow of money among bank accounts possessed by firms in a region by employing an exhaustive list of all the bank transfers in a regional bank in Japan, to clarify how the network of money flow is related to the economic activities of the firms. The network statistics and structures are examined and shown to be similar to those of a nationwide production network. Specifically, the bowtie analysis indicates what we refer to as a "walnut" structure with core and upstream/downstream components. To quantify the location of an individual account in the network, we used the Hodge decomposition method and found that the Hodge potential of the account has a significant correlation to its position in the bowtie structure as well as to its net flow of incoming and outgoing money and links, namely the net demand/supply of individual accounts. In addition, we used non-negative matrix factorization to identify important factors underlying the entire flow of money; it can be interpreted that these factors are associated with regional economic activities. One factor has a feature whereby the remittance source is localized to the largest city in the region, while the destination is scattered. The other factors correspond to the economic activities specific to different local places. This study serves as a basis for further investigation on the relationship between money flow and economic activities of firms.

Economic complexity of prefectures in Japan.

Every nation prioritizes the inclusive economic growth and development of all regions. However, we observe that economic activities are clustered in space, which results in a disparity in per-capita income among different regions. A complexity-based method was proposed by Hidalgo and Hausmann [PNAS 106, 10570-10575 (2009)] to explain the large gaps in per-capita income across countries. Although there have been extensive studies on countries' economic complexity using international export data, studies on economic complexity at the regional level are relatively less studied. Here, we study the industrial sector complexity of prefectures in Japan based on the basic information of more than one million firms. We aggregate the data as a bipartite network of prefectures and industrial sectors. We decompose the bipartite network as a prefecture-prefecture network and sector-sector network, which reveals the relationships among them. Similarities among the prefectures and among the sectors are measured using a metric. From these similarity matrices, we cluster the prefectures and sectors using the minimal spanning tree technique. The computed economic complexity index from the structure of the bipartite network shows a high correlation with macroeconomic indicators, such as per-capita gross prefectural product and prefectural income per person. We argue that this index reflects the present economic performance and hidden potential of the prefectures for future growth.

Interindustry linkages of prices-Analysis of Japan's deflation.

The interactions among macroprices with leads and lags play a significant role in explaining the behavior of an aggregate price index. Thus, to understand inflation and deflation, it is essential to explore the mechanism according to which these macroprices interact with each other. On the basis of a new method, we show that, irrespective of the sources of shocks, a robust flow of changes occurs in domestic prices from upstream to downstream. Moreover, we demonstrate that macroprices change in clusters, and we identify these clusters. Firms are not symmetric. Overall, our analysis suggests that the inertia arising from input/output linkages in production explains the behavior of aggregate prices.

Publisher Correction: Relationship between Macroeconomic Indicators and Economic Cycles in U.S.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Relationship between Macroeconomic Indicators and Economic Cycles in U.S.

We analyze monthly time series of 57 US macroeconomic indicators (18 leading, 30 coincidental, and 9 lagging) and 5 other trade/money indexes. Using novel methods, we confirm statistically significant co-movements among these time series and identify noteworthy economic events. The methods we use are Complex Hilbert Principal Component Analysis (CHPCA) and Rotational Random Shuffling (RRS). We obtain significant complex correlations among the US economic indicators with leads/lags. We then use the Hodge decomposition to obtain the hierarchical order of each time series. The Hodge potential allows us to better understand the lead/lag relationships. Using both CHPCA and Hodge decomposition approaches, we obtain a new lead/lag order of the macroeconomic indicators and perform clustering analysis for positively serially correlated positive and negative changes of the analyzed indicators. We identify collective negative co-movements around the Dot.com bubble in 2001 as well as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in October 2008. We also identify important events such as the Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and the Oil Price Crisis in July 2008. Additionally, we demonstrate that some coincidental and lagging indicators actually show leading indicator characteristics. This suggests that there is a room for existing indicators to be improved.

Hierarchical communities in the walnut structure of the Japanese production network.

This paper studies the structure of the Japanese production network, which includes one million firms and five million supplier-customer links. This study finds that this network forms a tightly-knit structure with a core giant strongly connected component (GSCC) surrounded by IN and OUT components constituting two half-shells of the GSCC, which we call awalnut structure because of its shape. The hierarchical structure of the communities is studied by the Infomap method, and most of the irreducible communities are found to be at the second level. The composition of some of the major communities, including overexpressions regarding their industrial or regional nature, and the connections that exist between the communities are studied in detail. The findings obtained here cause us to question the validity and accuracy of using the conventional input-output analysis, which is expected to be useful when firms in the same sectors are highly connected to each other.

Business cycles' correlation and systemic risk of the Japanese supplier-customer network.

This work aims to study and explain the business cycle correlations of the Japanese production network. We consider the supplier-customer network, which is a directed network representing the trading links between Japanese firms (links from suppliers to customers). The community structure of this network is determined by applying the Infomap algorithm. Each community is defined by its GDP and its associated business cycle. Business cycle correlations between communities are estimated based on copula theory. Then, based on firms' attributes and network topology, these correlations are explained through linear econometric models. The results show strong evidence of business cycle correlations in the Japanese production network. A significant systemic risk is found for high negative or positive shocks. These correlations are explained mainly by the sector and by geographic similarities. Moreover, our results highlight the higher vulnerability of small communities and small firms, which is explained by the disassortative mixing of the production network.

Interdependencies and Causalities in Coupled Financial Networks.

We explore the foreign exchange and stock market networks for 48 countries from 1999 to 2012 and propose a model, based on complex Hilbert principal component analysis, for extracting significant lead-lag relationships between these markets. The global set of countries, including large and small countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East, is contrasted with the limited scopes of targets, e.g., G5, G7 or the emerging Asian countries, adopted by previous works. We construct a coupled synchronization network, perform community analysis, and identify formation of four distinct network communities that are relatively stable over time. In addition to investigating the entire period, we divide the time period into into "mild crisis," (1999-2002), "calm," (2003-2006) and "severe crisis" (2007-2012) sub-periods and find that the severe crisis period behavior dominates the dynamics in the foreign exchange-equity synchronization network. We observe that in general the foreign exchange market has predictive power for the global stock market performances. In addition, the United States, German and Mexican markets have forecasting power for the performances of other global equity markets.

Bank-firm credit network in Japan: an analysis of a bipartite network.

We investigate the networked nature of the Japanese credit market. Our investigation is performed with tools of network science. In our investigation we perform community detection with an algorithm which is identifying communities composed of both banks and firms. We show that the communities obtained by directly working on the bipartite network carry information about the networked nature of the Japanese credit market. Our analysis is performed for each calendar year during the time period from 1980 to 2011. To investigate the time evolution of the networked structure of the credit market we introduce a new statistical method to track the time evolution of detected communities. We then characterize the time evolution of communities by detecting for each time evolving set of communities the over-expression of attributes of firms and banks. Specifically, we consider as attributes the economic sector and the geographical location of firms and the type of banks. In our 32-year-long analysis we detect a persistence of the over-expression of attributes of communities of banks and firms together with a slow dynamic of changes from some specific attributes to new ones. Our empirical observations show that the credit market in Japan is a networked market where the type of banks, geographical location of firms and banks, and economic sector of the firm play a role in shaping the credit relationships between banks and firms.

Fluctuation-dissipation theory of input-output interindustrial relations.

In this study, the fluctuation-dissipation theory is invoked to shed light on input-output interindustrial relations at a macroscopic level by its application to indices of industrial production (IIP) data for Japan. Statistical noise arising from finiteness of the time series data is carefully removed by making use of the random matrix theory in an eigenvalue analysis of the correlation matrix; as a result, two dominant eigenmodes are detected. Our previous study successfully used these two modes to demonstrate the existence of intrinsic business cycles. Here a correlation matrix constructed from the two modes describes genuine interindustrial correlations in a statistically meaningful way. Furthermore, it enables us to quantitatively discuss the relationship between shipments of final demand goods and production of intermediate goods in a linear response framework. We also investigate distinctive external stimuli for the Japanese economy exerted by the current global economic crisis. These stimuli are derived from residuals of moving-average fluctuations of the IIP remaining after subtracting the long-period components arising from inherent business cycles. The observation reveals that the fluctuation-dissipation theory is applicable to an economic system that is supposed to be far from physical equilibrium.