Nobuhiro Kiyotaki


Nobuhiro Kiyotaki Fellow of the British Academy is a Japanese economist and Professor of Economics at Princeton University especially known for proposing several models that provide deeper microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics, some of which play a prominent role in New Keynesian macroeconomics.

Career

He received a B.A. from University of Tokyo in 1978. After receiving his doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 1985, Kiyotaki held faculty positions at the Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison, the Univ. of Minnesota, and the London School of Economics before moving to Princeton.
He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, was awarded the 1997 Nakahara Prize of the Japan Economics Association and the 1999 Yrjö Jahnsson Award of the European Economic Association, the latter together with John Moore. In 2003, Kiyotaki was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Thomson Reuters lists Kiyotaki among the 'citation laureates' who are likely future winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Kiyotaki also received the Stephen A. Ross Prize in Financial Economics together with John Moore.

Contributions

In 1987, together with Olivier Blanchard, Kiyotaki demonstrated the importance of monopolistic competition for the aggregate demand multiplier. Most New Keynesian macroeconomic models now assume monopolistic competition for the reasons outlined by Blanchard and Kiyotaki.
Later, Kiyotaki worked with Randall Wright to construct a model of the role of money, showing how money increased economic efficiency by permitting trade of many different types of goods which might not be traded under a system of barter. This model, which formalized William Stanley Jevons' insight about the double coincidence of wants as a barrier to economic activity under barter, has come to be known as the Kiyotaki–Wright model.
In 1997, with John Moore, Kiyotaki constructed a model to show how small shocks to the economy might be amplified into large output fluctuations through the interaction between real estate prices and restrictions on the availability of credit. This model of 'credit cycles' is now known as the Kiyotaki–Moore model.

Selected publications

Journal articles