• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.317-342
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• 2017

The US dollar has kept as a position of key currency in the global economy in the changing international monetary system where the euro was introduced to some states of the EU in 1999. It is an evidence of inertia of the US dollar as a key currency. Our previous study (Ogawa and Muto, 2017b) conducted empirical analysis to investigate effects of several events on inertia of the US dollar. One of our findings was that the introduction of the euro increased utility of euro while utility of US dollar was kept unchanged. This paper examines the effects of the global financial crisis and the euro zone crisis as well as the introduction of the euro on the utility of the Japanese yen. The introduction of the euro significantly decreased the utility of the Japanese yen. It indicates that the introduction of the euro increased the utility of the euro while reducing the utility of the Japanese yen rather than the utility of the US dollar. The utility of the Japanese yen has significantly decreased while the global financial crisis and the euro zone crisis occurred. The Japanese yen has a declining trend in terms of its utility over time in the changing international monetary system.

• International Area Studies Review
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.61-78
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• 2010

The paper is basically attempted to reveal a possibility of monetary unification and setting an anchor currency in North East Asian economies such as South Korea, China, and Japan. The Cobb-Douglas utility function is tentatively built by a Walrasian economic framework. Korean Won(KRW) is represented for a numeraire in a structural model, and the estimation of a parameter is performed by 2SLS and GARCH-M models. Empirical evidence is found that not only monetary unification itself in this regime seems not to be practicable, but also setting an anchor currency by Chinese Yuan(CNY) or Japanese Yen(JPY) is also inappropriated due to the fact that the estimated parameter is not converged to a unity. Walrasian equilibria are enhanced by the convergence to a unity in the model. It also has to be mentioned that a number of necessary and sufficient conditions should be fulfilled prior to discuss a monetary unification in North East Asian economies. Instead, Asia currency unit(ACU) is more feasible in reality.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.11 no.10
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• pp.55-62
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• 2013

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to suggest a risk factor that significantly explains foreign currency risk premia. In recent years, some studies have found that the performance of the simultaneous consumption risk model improves considerably when tested on foreign currency portfolios, which are constructed based on the international interest rates differentials. However, this paper focuses on the long-run consumption risk factor. In our empirical research, we found that the real excess returns of high interest rate currency portfolios depreciate on average, when the future American long-run consumption growth rate appears low. This makes the high interest rate currency portfolios have relatively high risk premia. Meanwhile, the real excess returns of low interest rate currency portfolios appreciate on average, under the same conditions, which results in relatively low risk premia for these portfolios. Therefore, this long-run consumption risk factor might explain why low interest rate currencies do not appreciate as much as the interest rate differential, and why high interest rate currencies do not depreciate as much as the interest rate differential. Research design, data, methodology - In our explanation, we provide new evidence on the success of long-run consumption risks in currency risk premia by focusing on the long-run consumption risks borne by American representative investors. To uncover the hidden link between exchange rates and long-run consumption growth, we set the eight currency portfolios as our basic assets, which have been built based on the foreign interest rates of eighty countries. As these eight currency portfolios are rebalanced every year, the first group always contains the lowest interest rate currencies, and the last group contains the highest interest rate currencies. Against these basic eight currency portfolios, we estimate the long-run consumption risk model. We use recursive utility framework and the stochastic discount factor that depends on the present value of expected future consumption growth rates. We find that our model is optimized in the two-year period of constructing the durable consumption expectation factor. Our main results surprisingly surpass the performance of the existing benchmark simultaneous consumption model in terms of R², relatively risk aversion coefficient γ, and p-value of J-test. Results - The performance of our model is superior. R², relatively risk aversion coefficient γ, and p-value of J-test of our long-run durable consumption model are 90%, 93%, and 65.5%, respectively, while those of EZ-DCAPM are 87%, 113%, and 62.8%, respectively. Thus, we can speculate that the risk premia in foreign currency markets have been determined by the long-run consumption risk. Conclusions - The aggregate long-run consumption growth risk explains a large part of the average change in the real excess returns of foreign currency portfolios. The real excess returns of high interest rate currency portfolios depreciate on average when American long-run consumption growth rate is low, and the real excess returns of low interest rate currency portfolios appreciate under the same conditions. Thus, the low interest rate currency portfolios allow investors to hedge against aggregate long-run consumption growth risk.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.73-87
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• 2002

Public library statistics can be a useful tool for measuring public library resources and services and also supporting management process including planning and policy development. This study attempts to present an advanced national public library statistics system to report accurate description of public library situation. Main user groups and useful areas of public library statistics were identified through literature review, and the emerging trends of public library statistics systems at the national and international levels were summarized. Current public library statistics system, annually collected and published by the Korean Library Association, was analyzed and ways for the improvement were suggested particularly in the aspects of validity, reliability, consistency, currency, and utility.