Makoto NIREI

Makoto NIREI is Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo since 2017. Prior to joining the University of Tokyo, he was the Chief Economist of the Japanese Ministry of Finance's Policy Research Institute, where he remains today a Senior Research Fellow. Also policy-related, he is a Member of the German-Japanese Energy Transition Council since 2021. He is affiliated to the Japanese Economic Association, the Econometric Society, and the American Economic Association.

Since defending his doctoral dissertation in 2002 at the University of Chicago, Professor Nirei has held a number of faculty positions in both North America and Japan: Hitotsubashi University's Institute of Innovation Research, Carleton University, Utah State University, and, as a postdoctoral fellow, at the Santa Fe Institute.

His fields of interest span macroeconomics, business cycles, financial fluctuations, income inequality, innovation, and complex systems. He theoretically derived the conditions under which macroeconomic oscillations such as business cycles and financial market instability are caused bottom-up by the interactions of microeconomic agents, and found that the distribution characteristics of such endogenous economic oscillations match empirical observations of asset price oscillations and corporate investment propagation. He also clarified that the Pareto distribution universally observed on the wealthy end of asset and income distributions is generated by differences in the characteristics of the growth rates of asset income and labor income, and showed that it is strongly influenced by entrepreneurial risk taking, labor's share of the income, income tax rates, etc.

Makoto Nirei's personal website

Professor Nirei will be visiting with us from September 4th to December 18th, 2024.