Tsutomu Watanabe has been a Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo since October 2011. Previously, he was a Professor at Hitotsubashi University (1999-2011) and a Senior Economist at the Bank of Japan (1982-1999). He held visiting positions at various universities including Kyoto University, Bocconi University, and Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1992 and earned his undergraduate degree at The University of Tokyo.His main research area is monetary policy and inflation dynamics. He is known for his series of papers on monetary policy when nominal interest rates are bounded at zero; in particular, his 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.He is an author of many books and more than 40 academic journal articles on monetary policy, inflation dynamics, and international finance. He is the project leader of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research projects on Understand Inflation Dynamics of the Japanese Economy: An Approach Integrating Microeconomic Behaviors and Aggregate Fluctuations (2006-2011) and Understanding Persistent Deflation in Japan (2012-2017). He developed the Nikkei-UTokyo Daily Price Index® with Kota Watanabe.
