is a Japanese economist. He is a professor of economics at Northwestern University and, since December 2018, the chief scientific adviser of the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research.[1] He is also an international senior fellow at the Canon Institute of Global Studies.[2] He was awarded the Nakahara Prize from the Japanese Economic Association in 1996 and was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1999, and a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory[3] in 2011.

Early Life and Education

Born on November 19, 1957, Matsuyama grew up in Bunkyō-ku, Tokyo. After graduating from Seishi Elementary School, and then from Azabu High School, he enrolled in Science Division-I of the University of Tokyo, in 1976. Among those in his class in the Division was Makoto Gonokami (physicist and current president of the University of Tokyo). Matsuyama later switched to International Relations. Among those in his class there were Toyohisa Kozuki (current ambassador to Russia), Jun Yamazaki (current ambassador to Singapore, former ambassador to the United Nations and Sweden) and former LDP Diet member Seiji Hagiwara. It was through his studies in international relations that he came across economics for the first time. Although he passed the advanced-level civil service examination of the Japanese government in his senior year, he chose to continue his studies in economics.

After receiving his BA in International Relations in 1980, he enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Economics, where he studied with Ryūtarō Komiya, Kōichi Hamada, Takashi Negishi, and Tsuneo Ishikawa, as well as, briefly, with Motoshige Itō,[4] Katsuhito Iwai, and Kiyohiko Nishimura.

From October 1982, he also worked as a research assistant for economist Masahiro Okuno, who was then a visiting fellow at the Bank of Japan’s Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies.[5]

Matsuyama enrolled in Harvard University’s doctorate program in September 1983, where he studied under Jeffrey Sachs, Lawrence Summers, and Greg Mankiw. Classmates included Philippe Aghion, Abhijit Banerjee (2019 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences), Mathias Dewatripont, Miles Kimball, and Alan Krueger. He received a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1987.

Career

Matsuyama became an assistant professor of economics at Northwestern University in September 1987, associate professor in September 1991, and professor in September 1995. He spent 1991 at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University as a National Fellow. He received the Nakahara Prize from the Japanese Economic Association in 1996 and became a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1999. In addition to teaching at the University of Chicago as a visiting professor in 1993 and at MIT in 2008,[6] he has visited many universities and research institutes around the world and has been invited to deliver plenary lectures and keynote speeches at various international conferences.

In 2014, he became an international senior fellow of the Canon Institute for Global Studies,[7] and in December 2018 he was appointed chief scientific adviser of the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research

Research 

Matsuyama’s main fields of research are international trade and macroeconomics.[8] His thesis for a BA in international relations at the University of Tokyo was on foreign direct investment and multinational corporations. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University on the intertemporal approach to the current account and the game-theoretic analysis of the political economy of international monetary policy coordination and of trade and industrial policies. After joining the Northwestern faculty, he has worked extensively on such topics as international trade, economic growth, economic development, income inequality, structural change, and endogenous economic fluctuations. He is, in his own words, “interested in understanding the mechanisms behind macroeconomic instability, structural transformation, as well as inequality across countries, regions, and households, and how they interact with credit market imperfections and product market innovations.”[9]

Selected Papers 

"Current Account Dynamics in a Finite Horizon Model" Journal of International Economics 23 (November 1987): 299-313.
"Terms of Trade, Factor Intensities and the Current Account in a Life Cycle Model"  The Review of Economic Studies 55 (April 1988): 247-262.
"Residential Investment and the Current Account" Journal of International Economics 28 (February 1990): 137-153.
"Perfect Equilibria in a Trade Liberalization Game" The American Economic Review 80 (June 1990): 480-492.
"Increasing Returns, Industrialization, and Indeterminacy of Equilibrium," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 106 (May 1991): 617-650.
"Endogenous Price Fluctuations in an Optimizing Model of a Monetary Economy," Econometrica 59 (November 1991): 1617-1631.
"A Simple Model of Sectoral Adjustment," The Review of Economic Studies 59 (April 1992): 375-388.
"Custom versus Fashion: Path-dependence and Limit Cycles in a Random Matching Game," Working Paper in Economics, E-92-11, Hoover Institution.
"Agricultural Productivity, Comparative Advantage, and Economic Growth," Journal of Economic Theory 58 (December 1992): 317-334.
"Toward a Theory of International Currency," with Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and Akihiko Matsui, The Review of Economic Studies 60 (April 1993): 283-307.
"An Approach to Equilibrium Selection," with Akihiko Matsui, Journal of Economic Theory 65 (April 1995): 415-434.
"Complementarities and Cumulative Processes in Models of Monopolistic Competition," Journal of Economic Literature 33 (June 1995): 701-729.
"Start-up Costs and Pecuniary Externalities as Barriers to Economic Development," with Antonio Ciccone, Journal of Development Economics, 49 (April 1996): 33-59
"The 1996 Nakahara Lecture: Complementarity, Instability, and Multiplicity," Japanese Economic Review, 48 (September 1997): 240-266.
"Self-Defeating Regional Concentration," with Takaaki Takahashi, The Review of Economic Studies, 65 (April 1998): 211-234.
"Growing Through Cycles," Econometrica, 67 (March 1999): 335-347.
"Efficiency and Equilibrium with Dynamic Increasing Aggregate Returns Due to Demand Complementarities," with Antonio Ciccone, Econometrica, 67 (May 1999): 499-526.
"Endogenous Inequality," The Review of Economic Studies, 67 (October 2000): 743-759.
"A Ricardian Model with a Continuum of Goods under Nonhomothetic Preferences: Demand Complementarities, Income Distribution and North-South Trade," Journal of Political Economy, 108 (December 2000): 1093-1120.
"Growing Through Cycles in an Infinitely Lived Agent Economy,” Journal of Economic Theory, 100 (October 2001): 220-234.
"Explaining Diversity: Symmetry-Breaking in Complementarity Games,” American Economic Review, 92 (May 2002): 241-246.
"The Rise of Mass Consumption Societies," Journal of Political Economy, 110 (October 2002): 1035-1070.
"Financial Market Globalization, Symmetry-Breaking, and Endogenous Inequality of Nations,” Econometrica, 72 (May 2004): 853-884.
"Credit Market Imperfections and Patterns of International Trade and Capital Flows,” Journal of the European Economic Association, 3 (April-May 2005): 714-723.
"The 2005 Lawrence R. Klein Lecture: Emergent Class Structure,” International Economic Review, 47 (May 2006): 327-360.
"Credit Traps and Credit Cycles,” American Economic Review, 97 (March 2007): 503-516.
"Beyond Icebergs: Toward A Theory of Biased Globalization,” The Review of Economic Studies, 74 (January 2007): 237-253.
"Aggregate Implications of Credit Market Imperfections,” in Daron Acemoglu, Kenneth Rogoff, and Michael Woodford, eds., NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2007, Volume 22.
"Structural Change in an Interdependent World: A Global View of Manufacturing Decline," Journal of the European Economic Association, 7 (April-May 2009): 478-486.
"Imperfect Credit Markets, Household Wealth Distribution, and Development,” Annual Review of Economics, 2011, Volume 3, 339-362.
"The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: An Inquiry into the Causes and Nature of Credit Cycles,” Theoretical Economics, 8 (September 2013): 623-651.
Endogenous Ranking and Equilibrium Lorenz Curve Across (ex-ante) Identical Countries,” Econometrica, 81 (September 2013): 2009-2031.
"Institution-Induced Productivity Differences and Patterns of International Capital Flows,” Journal of the European Economic Association, 12 (February 2014): 1-24.
"Globalization and Synchronization of Innovation Cycles,” with Laura Gardini and Iryna Sushko, London School of Economics Centre for Macroeconomics DP#2015-27.
"Revisiting the Model of Credit Cycles with Good and Bad Projects,” with Iryna Sushko and Laura Gardini, Journal of Economic Theory, 163 (May 2016): 525-556.
"Geographical Advantage: Home Market Effect in a Multi-region World,” Research in Economics, (formerly Ricerche Economiche), 71 (December 2017): 740-758
"Beyond CES: Three Alternative Classes of Flexible Homothetic Demand Systems, “ with Philip Ushchev, December 2017, CEPR-DP12210.
"Engel’s Law in the Global Economy: Demand-Induced Patterns of Structural Change, Innovation, and Trade,” Econometrica, Vol. 87 No.2 (March 2019): 497-528.
"Reconsidering the Market Size Effect in Innovation and Growth,” with Helene Latzer and Mathieu Parenti, December 2019, CEPR-DP14250.

Other websites
Kiminori Matsuyama, Department of Economics, Northwestern University
Kiminori Matsuyama, Chief Scientific Adviser, Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research

References 
[1] Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, https://www.tkfd.or.jp/en/experts/detail.php?id=303 

[2] Canon Institute for Global Studies, https://www.canon-igs.org/en/fellows/kiminori_matsuyama.html 

[3] Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, https://saet.uiowa.edu/economic-theory-fellows/

[4] “Special New Year’s Colloquy: Priority Issues for Public Policy Research (Part I),” https://www.tkfd.or.jp/en/research/detail.php?id=668

[5] Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies(IMES), https://www.imes.boj.or.jp/english/index.html 

[6] http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~kmatsu/vita.pdf

[7] https://www.canon-igs.org/en/fellows/kiminori_matsuyama.html

[8] https://www.canon-igs.org/en/fellows/kiminori_matsuyama.html

[9] https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/en-economics-innovation-lab/Clement-Malgouyres__1.htm

Japanese economists
Japanese people
Harvard University alumni