

Research Expertise and Interest
macroeconomics, monetary policy
Research Description
Emi Nakamura is the Chancellor's Professor of Economics in the Berkeley Economics department. Her research focuses on monetary and fiscal policy, business cycles and macroeconomic measurement. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, co-director of the Monetary Economics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers. She is a recipient of the John Bates Clark medal, the Elaine Bennett Research Prize, the NSF Career Grant, and the Sloan Research Fellowship. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and an A.B. from Princeton University, and taught at the Columbia economics department and business school before joining the Berkeley economics department in 2018.
In the News
Prices are spiking for homes, cars and gas. Don’t be alarmed, economists say
Berkeley economist wins prestigious John Bates Clark Medal
Featured in the Media
The American Economic Association has awarded economics professor Emi Nakamura its John Bates Clark Medal, a prestigious honor for economists who are under the age of 40 and have made significant contributions to the field. Professor Nakamura is the fourth woman to win the award since it was inaugurated in 1947. In their citation, they praised her distinctive approach and creativity. "One of the central challenges is that we don't get to do experiments in economic policy as compared to the sciences," Professor Nakamura says. "We don't get to do trials on the effects of these policies, so figuring out the effects is really challenging. ... My research has been using new sources of data to come up with better evidence for these effects." She says her goals include addressing some of the key economic questions, such as what causes recessions and how policy makers can help us avoid them, and helping to make the field of economics more of an empirical discipline that relies on evidence to make predictions. "Macroeconomics is really about situations where everything is affecting everything else and in that situation it's hard to learn things," she says. "Learning more things about how the world works will help reduce the influence of ideology." For more on this, see the announcement at the American Economic Association. Other stories on this topic appeared in The Economist, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance.