Cases of Indiscriminate Killing and Society: Toward a Sociological Analysis of Curvatures in Contemporary Society

Indiscriminate killing is regarded as a radically antisocial act for its transgression of the social contract as well as the legal system. However, previous studies of indiscriminate killing have mainly focused on classifying these acts and their subjective aspects rather than analyzing the society producing and narrating about the acts. Therefore, this article aims to examine the correlations between cases of indiscriminate killing and wounding and social space, with reference to the contemporary Japanese society. In general, indiscriminate offenses are discussed within the social space via narratives disseminated or reported by the mass media. Although these narratives are also adopted by the criminal offenders, victims, media, courts and public, many fail to provide a satisfactory explanation for the offense. Instead of following these narrators and simply speculating about the reasons for these offenses, this article analyzes the correlations between antisocial incidents and the systematical realities of a society. Using this approach, this article examines the possibility of constructing an analytical frame of reference that focuses on the figurative, structural and allegorical correspondences between an aggregation of incidents caused by individuals and a society's systematical realities.     

THE EFFECTS OF ASSET PURCHASES AND NORMALIZATION OF U.S. MONETARY POLICY

This paper examines changes in the effects of unconventional monetary policies in the United States. To this end, we estimate a Markov-switching VAR model with absorbing regimes to capture possible structural changes. Our results detect regime changes around the beginning of 2011 and the middle of 2013. Before 2011, the U.S. large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) had relatively large impacts on the real economy and prices, but after the middle of 2013, their effects were weaker and less-persistent. In addition, after the middle of 2013, which includes the monetary policy normalization period, the asset purchase (or balance sheet) shocks had slightly weaker effects than during the early stage of the LSAPs but stronger effects than during the late stage of the LSAPs, while interest rate shocks had insignificant effects on the real economy and prices. Finally, our results suggest that the positive responses of durables and capital goods expenditures to interest rate shocks weakened the negative impacts of interest rate hikes after the middle of 2013 including the period of monetary policy normalization. (JEL C32, E21, E52)