Capital Market Integration with Multiple Convergence Clubs: The Case of Prewar Japan

Tsutomu Watanabe
Additional contact information
Tsutomu Watanabe: Dean and Professor of Economics, Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo. Founder and Technical Advisor, Nowcast Inc.

No CARF-F-476, CARF F-Series from Center for Advanced Research in Finance, Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo

Abstract: This note compares the responses of consumption and prices to the COVID-19 shock and another large-scale natural disaster that hit Japan, the Tohoku earthquake in March 2011. The comparison shows that the responses of supermarket sales and prices at a daily frequency during the two crises are quite similar: (1) the year-on-year rate of sales growth increased quickly and reached a peak of 20 percent two weeks after the outbreak of COVID-19 in Japan, which is quite similar to the response immediately after the earthquake; (2) the items consumers purchased at supermarkets in these two crisis are almost identical; (3) the year-on-year rate of consumer price inflation for goods rose by 0.6 percentage points in response to the coronavirus shock, compared to 2.2 percentage points in the wake of the earthquake. However, evidence suggests that whereas people expected higher inflation for goods and services in the wake of the earthquake, they expect lower inflation in response to the coronavirus shock. This difference in inflation expectations suggests that the economic deterioration due to COVID-19 should be viewed as driven mainly by an adverse aggregate demand shock to face-to-face service industries such as hotels and leisure, transportation, and retail, rather than as driven by an aggregate supply shock.

Pages: 17
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mon
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.carf.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/admin/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/F476.pdf (application/pdf)

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:cfi:fseres:cf476

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CARF F-Series from Center for Advanced Research in Finance, Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().