The effects of large-scale equity purchases during the coronavirus pandemic

Shin-ichi Fukuda and Mariko Tanaka

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 2024, vol. 71, issue C

Abstract: This study examines the effects of the Bank of Japan's (BOJ) large-scale equity purchases on the Nikkei 225 during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Although the BOJ started equity purchases in 2010, the purchased amount reached unprecedented levels when the pandemic broke out. The large-scale purchases provide a natural experiment to examine how effective the central bank's equity purchases were in the crisis. Unlike previous studies, we use intra-day data and investigate the purchase effects allowing for endogeneity. We first derive the BOJ's intra-day reaction function by estimating probit models. From this reaction function, we then calculate the BOJ's unexpected and expected purchases and examine their effects on the Nikkei 225 returns in the Tokyo Stock Exchange's afternoon session. We find that the BOJ's unexpected large-scale purchases had large positive instantaneous impacts on intra-day returns during the pandemic. However, the large positive impacts arose because most of the purchases came as big surprises to the markets. We argue that the policy would be effective only if the BOJ continues to surprise the market. We also argue that the BOJ's purchases increased the volatility of the Nikkei 225.

Keywords: Large-scale equity purchases; The coronavirus pandemic; The Bank of Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E58 G01 G12 H12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889158323000588
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jjieco:v:71:y:2024:i:c:s0889158323000588

DOI: 10.1016/j.jjie.2023.101303

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies is currently edited by Takeo Hoshi

More articles in Journal of the Japanese and International Economies from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().