Are Economists Japan's New Exports?

I created a list of Japanese economists who currently work at universities outside of Japan: Link.

Although the list is still incomplete (it may never be complete), the number of economists has already reached 100! This is far beyond my expectation!! And so, making the list has taken much longer time than I expected...

As you might know, getting an academic job at a good research university is very difficult, even if you have a Ph.D. from a top school. The list shows that Japanese economists, especially among the young generation (those graduated their colleges in the late 90's or later), are highly competitive. In recent years, it is not uncommon for Japanese junior economists to get international academic jobs posted in the JOE.

I wish my list help visualizing the great success of overseas Japanese economists, and stimulate domestic Japanese economists as well. By the way, a list of Japanese economists who work at domestic universities (with reasonably good research outputs) is now in preparation. Don't miss it!

Contract Theory Conference

I organized the 4th Japan-Taiwan Contract Theory Conference on December 4, 2010 at my institute, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), which turned out to be extremely successful. We had 49 participants, including 18 guests from Taiwan; enjoyed listening to six intriguing talks and discussion. I am grateful for all who kindly attended this event and helped me setting it up.
The following is the conference program with my brief comments.

First session: 10:05--11:55

Chair: Chia-Hui Chen (Academia Sinica)

Speaker 1: Chien-Lung Chen (National Tsing-Hua University) 

• How Can Agents Be Better-Off with Pay Caps?  

Speaker 2: Mami Kobayashi (Kinki University)  

• Market Liquidity and Capital Structure of Financial Institution

Comments: The first talk is about optimal wage scheme under pay caps (in addition to minimum wage constraints), and the second is about incentive issues on corporate finance and governance. Theoretical robustness and the connection to actual labor and financial markets were discussed.                                              

Second session: 13:10--15:00

Chair: Jong-Rong Chen (National Central University)

Speaker 1: Chi-Hsiang Liu (National Central University)

• Promotion, Relative and Individual Performance Pay

Speaker 2: Kohei Kawamura （University of Edinburgh）

• Eliciting Information from a Large Population

Comments: Both talks showed frontier works on contract theory. The first one is considerable extension of promotion model and the second is to combine the ideas of cheap talk and (sequential) Bayesian learning. The interpretation and potential applications of their results were discussed.

Third session: 15:20―17:10

Chair: Pao-Chih Cheng (National Central University)

Speaker 1: Hsiang-Ling Shen (National Taiwan University)

• Sponsored Search Auctions under Two Search Engines

Speaker 2: Takanori Adachi (Nagoya University)

• Political Accountability, Electoral Control and Media Bias (with Yoichi Hizen)

Comments: Two speakers talked about their preliminary works which are both very new and strongly connected to real life interests: sponsored search auctions and media bias. Since some parts of their models were not well shaped yet, ideas for further improvement were discussed and proposed.

Frontiers of Science

I have been to Potsdam in Germany on Nov. 11 - 14 to attend 7th Japanese-German Frontiers of Science Symposium 2010 (link). It's a really interdisciplinary conference jointly organized by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Japan Society for the Promotion of  Science.

I was a invited speaker of the social science session titled "New Methods in Decision Making" (session list), and talked about "Recent Developments in Market Design and its Applications to School Choice" (slide). It was quite exciting to give a presentation to researchers from completely different fields, mainly from natural science. Although I didn't have enough time to cover the details of my own studies, many of them seem to get surprised to see how powerful and useful game theoretical tools are.

I also enjoyed the talks and discussions in other sessions very much. Most of topics were unfamiliar to me of course, but their frontier works looked truly exciting. This was a wonderful opportunity indeed! Many thanks to the organizers and participants :)

ES Monographs Online

If you are a member of the econometric society, you can download most of (perhaps all) the monograph series of ES published by the Cambridge University Press FOR FREE. The series covers representative books in advanced economic theory and econometrics such as:




Collective papers in the world congress are also included:


Please access the ES website here and log in. Then, you can jump to the publisher's website with an online access code to the book chapters.

JEP for FREE

Here comes a great news!

Online issues of the Journal of Economic Perspectives published since 1999 are now publicly accessible at no charge, compliments of the American Economic Association.

You can access to the Journal of Economic Perspectives from here. The symposium in the latest volume (Spring 2010), Con out of Economics, contains interesting debate among leading econometricians that may attract much attention.