This monographic paper summarizes views held by the Bank of Japan (hereafter BOJ or the Bank) in the 1990s regarding economic and financial conditions as well as the conduct of monetary policy, based on materials compiled during the period mainly in its Archives. The following points were confirmed in writing this paper. First, throughout the 1990s, the Bank's thinking behind the conduct of monetary policy had shifted toward emphasizing the transparency of its policy management. The basic background to this seemed to be the growing importance of dialogue with market participants, reflecting a change in the target for money market operations from official discount rate changes to the guiding of money market rates. In addition, the fact that the revised Bank of Japan Act (hereafter the Bank of Japan Act of 1997) came into effect in April 1998 under the two principles of independence and transparency accelerated the trend of attaching importance to transparency. Second, on the...

I construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to investigate how the liquidity management of different size banks responds to liquidity and loan demand shocks. My investigation shows the following. Compared with small banks, large banks tend to be net borrowers and thus more exposed to liquidity risk. In response to negative liquidity shocks, large banks decrease their credit supply while small ones increase theirs. In response to negative loan demand shocks, both large and small banks decrease their credit supply. Connecting these implications with the panel data, I argue that negative liquidity shocks served as the main driver of the Great Recession initially, and negative demand shocks did so later, and that demand shocks accounted for two thirds of the greatest fall in aggregate loans during the recession.

Keywords: Great Recession; Bank liquidity management; Occasionally binding constraints; Heterogeneous bank model; General equilibrium model