WATANABE, Tsutomu

WATANABE, Tsutomu

Name / Position

WATANABE, Tsutomu / Professor

Website

Personal WebsiteOpen a new window

E-mail

watanabe[at]e.u-tokyo.ac.jp
*Please replace [at] with@

Curriculum Vitae

Education

1992 March Harvard University Ph. D. in Economics
1982 March University of Tokyo BA in Economics

Professional Experience

2011 October Professor, Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo
2002 January Professor, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University
1999 April Associate Professor, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University
1982 April Bank of Japan

Research Field

Macroeconomics, International Finance, Corporate Finance

Research Theme

My main research area is monetary policy and inflation dynamics. I have published a series of papers on monetary policy when nominal interest rates are bounded at zero; in particularly, my paper on the optimal monetary policy at the zero lower bound has been widely recognized as the first paper to provide a simple description of the liquidity trap and characterize the optimal policy response to it in a setting of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. As for inflation dynamics, I have been engaged in empirical analysis on the source of price stickiness using micro price data. I was Project Leader of a five-year JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Creative Scientific Research project commenced in 2006 on “Understand Inflation Dynamics of the Japanese Economy: An Approach Integrating Microeconomic Behaviors and Aggregate Fluctuations”.

Publications

Articles

  • Japan's Voluntary Lockdown: Further Evidence Based on Age-Specific Mobile Location Data (with T. Yabu) Japanese Economic Review. Published online: 21 June 2021.
  • Online Consumption During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Japan (with Y. Omori)  In E. Mazaheri (Ed.), The Impact of COVID19 On E-Commerce (pp.43-66). Proud Pen.
  • The Welfare Implications of Massive Money Injection: The Japanese Experience from 2013 to 2020, Asian Economic Policy Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, 224-242, July 2021. First published: 12 March 2021.
  • Japan's Voluntary Lockdown (with T. Yabu) PLoS ONE 16(6): e0252468. Published: 10 June 2021.
  • Multilayer Network Approach to Dynamics of Japanese Interfirm Transaction Relations (with H. Sato, Y. Kichikawa, H. Iyetomi). In: Ikeda Y., Iyetomi H., Mizuno T. (eds) Big Data Analysis on Global Community Formation and Isolation. Springer, Singapore. First Online: 13 June 2021.
  • Trade Clustering and Power Laws in Financial Markets (with M. Nirei, J. Stachurski) Theoretical Economics, Volume 15, Number 4, November 2020, 1365-1398.
  • The Formation of Consumer Inflation Expectations: New Evidence from Japan's Deflation Experience (with J. Diamond, K. Watanabe) International Economic Review, Volume 61, Issue 1, 241-281, February 2020.  
  • Property Price Index: Theory and Practice (with E. Diewert, K. G. Nishimura, C. Shimizu) Advances in Japanese Business and Economics, Vol. 11, Springer, January 2020. 
  • House Price Dispersion in Boom-Bust Cycles: Evidence from Tokyo (with T. Ohnishi, T. Mizuno) Japanese Economic Review, 71(4), 511-539, October 2020. First Online: 10 December 2019. 
  • Detecting stock market bubbles based on the cross-sectional dispersion of stock prices (with T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi) In: Sato H., Iwanaga S., Ishii A. (eds) Proceedings of the 23rd Asia Pacific Symposium on Intelligent and Evolutionary Systems. IES 2019. Proceedings in Adaptation, Learning and Optimization, vol 12. Springer, Cham. First Online: 05 December 2019.
  • Product Turnover and the Cost of Living Index: Quality vs. Fashion Effects (with K. Ueda, K. Watanabe) American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 11(2), 310-347, April 2019.
  • Working Less and Bargain Hunting More: Macro Implications of Sales during Japan's Lost Decades (with K. Watanabe, K. Ueda, N. Sudo) Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Volume 50, Issue 2-3, 449-478, March-April 2018. First published: 25 March 2018
  • Why Has Japan Failed to Escape from Deflation? (with K. Watanabe) Asian Economic Policy Review, Vol. 13, No, 1, Jan 2018, 23-41.
  • Novel and Topical Business News and Their Impacts on Stock Market Activity (with T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi)  EPJ Data Science (2017) 6: 26.
  • The Gradual Evolution of Buyer-Seller Networks and Their Role in Aggregate Fluctuations (with R. Hisano, T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi, D. Sornette) Applied Network Science, 2017 2:9 Published on: 25 May 2017.
  • Dependence of the Decay Rate of Firm Activity on Firm Age  (with A. Ishikawa, S. Fujimoto, T. Mizuno) Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Volume 14, Issue 2, 351–362, December 2017.
  • Relationship between Population Density and Migration (with S. Fujimoto, T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi, C. Shimizu) Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, 117-130, June 2017.
  • “Transition Law of Firms' Activity and the Deficit Aspect of Non-Gibrat's Law,” (with A. Ishikawa, S. Fujimoto, T. Mizuno) JPS Conference Proceedings 16, 011005, 2017
  • Who Buys What and Where: Reconstruction of International Trade Flows by Commodity and Industry (with Y. Ikeda) In: Cherifi H., Gaito S., Quattrociocchi W., Sala A. (eds) Complex Networks & Their Applications V: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Complex Networks and their Applications. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 693, Springer, 657-670, 2016.
  • Power Laws in Market Capitalization During the Dot-com and Shanghai Bubble Periods (with T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi) Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Volume 13, Issue 2, 445-454, December 2016.
  • Long-term Firm Growth Properties Derived From Short-term Laws of Sales and the Number of Employees (with A. Ishikawa, S. Fujimoto, T. Mizuno) Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Volume 13, Issue 2, 409-422, December 2016.
  • Community structure and dynamics of the industry sector-specific international-trade-network (with Y. Ikeda, H. Iyetomi, T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi) in Signal-Image Technology and Internet-Based Systems (SITIS), 2014, 456-461.
  • How Much Do Official Price Indexes Tell Us about Inflation? (with J. Handbury, D. E. Weinstein) NBER Working Paper No.19504, October 2013. Revised December 2015.
  • House Prices at Different Stages of the Buying/Selling Process (with C. Shimizu, K. G. Nishimura) Regional Science and Urban Economics, Volume 59, July 2016, Pages 37-53.
  • Structure of Global Buyer-Supplier Networks and Its Implications for Conflict Minerals Regulations (with T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi) EPJ Data Science, 5 1 (2016) 2 Published online: 16 January 2016 DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0063-7
  • Firm Growth and Extended Gibrat's Law (with A. Ishikawa, S. Fujimoto, T. Mizuno) Advances in Mathematical Physics, vol. 2016, Article ID 9303480, 6 pages, 2016. doi:10.1155/2016/9303480.. 
  • Firm Age Distributions and the Decay Rate of Firm Activities (with A. Ishikawa, S. Fujimoto, T. Mizuno) Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Modeling and Simulation, 2015, Springer, 187-194.
  • The Structure of Global Inter-firm Networks (with T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi)  In: Aiello L., McFarland D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8852. Springer, Cham, 28 February 2015, 334-338.
  • Geographic Dependency of Population Distributions (with S. Fujimoto, T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi, C. Shimizu) Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Modeling and Simulation, 2015, Springer, 151-162.
  • Relationship between Job Opportunities and Economic Environments: Evidence from Online Job Search Data (with A. Sato, C. Shimizu, T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi) Procedia Computer Science, Volume 60, 2015, 1255-1262.
  • Relationship between Firm Age Distributions and the Decay Rate of Firm Activities in the United States and Japan (with A Ishikawa, S. Fujimoto, T Mizuno) Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Santa Clara, CA, 2015, pp. 2726-2731. doi: 10.1109/BigData.2015.7364073
  • Are Firms that Are Awarded More Patents More Productive? (with S. Fujimoto, A. Ishikawa, T. Mizuno) In Abergel, F., Aoyama, H., Chakrabarti, B. K., Chakraborti, A., & Ghosh, A. (eds.) Econophysics and Data Driven Modelling of Market Dynamics, Springer, February 2015, 129-142.
  • Estimating Quality Adjusted Commercial Property Price Indexes Using Japanese REIT Data (with C. Shimizu, W. E. Diewert, K. G. Nishimura) Journal of Property Research, Volume 32, Issue 3, 2015. Published online: 20 Jul 2015.
  • The Economics of Interfirm Networks (edited with I. Uesugi, A. Ono) Advances in Japanese Business and Economics, Vol. 4, Springer, June 2015.
  • Buyer-Supplier Networks and Aggregate Volatility (with T. Mizuno, W. Souma)  in T. Watanabe, I. Uesugi, A. Ono, eds., The Economics of Interfirm Networks, Springer, June 2015.
  • Aging and Real Estate Prices: Evidence from Japanese and US Regional Data (with Y. Saita, C. Shimizu) International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, Vol. 9 Issue 1, 2016, 66-87.
  • The Structure and Evolution of Buyer-Supplier Networks (with T. Mizuno, W. Souma) PLoS ONE 9(7): e100712. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0100712. Published: July 07, 2014.
  • Analytical Derivation of Power Laws in Firm Size Variables from Gibrat's Law and Quasi-Inversion Symmetry: A Geomorphological Approach (with A. Ishikawa, S. Fujimoto, T. Mizuno) Journal of the Physical Society of Japan, Vol. 83, No. 3, 034802. Published online February 18, 2014.
  • Japan's Persistent Deflation and Monetary Policy: Editors' Overview. (with T. Ito, K. Iwata, C. McKenzie, S. Urata) Asian Economic Policy Review, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2014, 1–19.
  • Product Downsizing and Hidden Price Increases: Evidence from Japan's Deflationary Period (with S. Imai), Asian Economic Policy Review, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2014, 69-89.
  • A Stochastic Model for Order Book Dynamics in Online Product Markets (with T. Mizuno, M. Nirei) Evolutionary and Institutional Economic Review, VOL.10, NO.1, 2013, 93-105. Published 4 September 2013.
  • Why Are Product Prices in Online Markets Not Converging? (with T. Mizuno) PLoS ONE 8(8): e72211. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0072211. Published 28 August 2013.
  • High Quality Topic Extraction from Business News Explains Abnormal Financial Market Volatility (with R. Hisano, D. Sornette, T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi) PLoS ONE 8(6): e64846. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064846. Published 6 June 2013.
  • The Emergence of Different Tail Exponents in the Distributions of Firm Size Variables (with A. Ishikawa, S. Fujimoto, T. Mizuno) Physica A, Volume 392, Issue 9, 1 May 2013, 2104–2113.
  • The Great Intervention and Massive Money Injection: The Japanese Experience 2003-2004 (with T. Yabu) Journal of International Money and Finance, Volume 32, February 2013, 428-443.
  • A New Method for Identifying the Effects of Foreign Exchange Interventions (with C. Chen, T. Yabu) Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Volume 44, Issue 8, December 2012, 1507-1533.
  • Power Laws in Real Estate Prices during Bubble Periods (with T. Ohnishi, T. Mizuno, C. Shimizu) International Journal of Modern Physics: Conference Series, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2012, 61-81.
  • Random Walk or A Run: Market Microstructure Analysis of Foreign Exchange Rate Movements Based on Conditional Probability (with Y. Hashimoto, T. Ito, T. Ohnishi, M. Takayasu, H. Takayasu) Quantitative Finance, Vol. 12, No. 6, June 2012, 893-905.
  • Temporal and Cross Correlations in Business News (with T. Mizuno, T. Ohnishi, K. Takei) Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement, No. 194, June 2012, 181-192.
  • House Prices from Magazines, Realtors, and the Land Registry (with C. Shimizu, K. G. Nishimura) in Property Markets and Financial Stability, BIS Papers No.64, Bank for International Settlements, March 2012, 29-38.
  • Power Laws in Firm Productivity (with T. Mizuno, A. Ishikawa, S. Fujimoto)  Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement, No. 194, June 2012, 122-134.
  • On the Nonstationarity of the Exchange Rate Process (with T. Ohnishi, H. Takayasu, T. Ito, Y. Hashimoto, M. Takayasu)  International Review of Financial Analysis, Volume 23, June 2012, 30-34.
  • Fiscal Policy Switching in Japan, the US, and the UK (with A. Ito, T. Yabu)  Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Volume 25, Issue 4, December 2011, 380-413.
  • A New Method for Measuring Tail Exponents of Firm Size Distributions (with S. Fujimoto, A. Ishikawa, T. Mizuno)  Economics E-Journal, Vol. 5, 2011-20, December 7, 2011.
  • Closely Competing Firms and Price Adjustment: Some Findings from an Online Marketplace  (with T. Mizuno, M. Nirei) Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Volume 112, Issue 4, December 2010, 673-696.
  • “Collective Purchase Behavior toward Retail Price Changes,” (with H. Ueno, H. Takayasu, and M. Takayasu) Physica A, Volume 390, Issue 3, February 2011, 499-504.　  
  • “Housing Prices in Tokyo: A Comparison of Hedonic and Repeat-Sales Measures,” (with C. Shimizu and K. G. Nishimura) Journal of Economics and Statistics, Volume 230, Issue 6, Special issue on “Index Theory and Price Statistics” edited by Erwin Diewert and Peter von der Lippe, December 2010, 792-813.
  • “Firm Age and the Evolution of Borrowing Costs: Evidence from Japanese Small Firms,” (with K. Sakai and I. Uesugi) Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 34, No.8, August 2010, 1970–1981.
  • “Residential Rents and Price Rigidity: Micro Structure and Macro Consequences,” (with C. Shimizu and K. G. Nishimura) Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Volume 24, Issue 2, June 2010, 282-299.
  • “A Statistical Analysis of Product Prices in Online Markets,” (with T. Mizuno) European Physical Journal B, Vol. 76, No. 4, August 2010, 501-506.
  • “The Bursting of Housing Bubble as Jamming Phase Transition,” (with K. Nishinari, M. Iwamura, Y. Saito) Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Volume 221, 012006, June 25, 2010.
  • “The Firm as a Bundle of Barcodes,” (with K. Sakai) European Physical Journal B, Vol. 76, No. 4, August 2010, 507-512.
  • “Life-span Distributions of Supermarket Products,” (with H. Ueno, M. Takayasu) Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Volume 221, 012018, June 25, 2010.

Other Professional Activities and Awards

Patent Registration

  •  Patent Number 6395307号（P6395307）「物価指数推定装置、物価指数推定プログラム及び方法」 (Systems and methods for consumer price index construction based on scanner data) Application Number: 2014-231511, Publication Number : 2016-095681, Identification Number: 6395307, Application Date:11/14/2014, Official Notice Date: 05/26/2016, Registration Date: 09/07/2018．Patent Applicant:University of Tokyo, Inventor:Tsutomu Watanabe, Kota Watanabe