Sagiri Kitao facts for kids

Sagiri Kitao (北尾 早霧, Kitao Sagiri, born 1972) is a Japanese economist. She is a professor at the University of Tokyo.

Her Journey to Economics

Sagiri Kitao was born in 1972 in Saitama, Japan. She finished her first university degree at Waseda University in 1996. After that, she worked for a big financial company called Goldman Sachs. She worked there until 1999.

After leaving Goldman Sachs, she decided to go back to school. She earned a Master's degree from Harvard University in 2001. Then, she went to New York University and got her Ph.D. in 2007. Her main teachers were Thomas J. Sargent and Gianluca Violante.

After her studies, Kitao worked as a professor at the University of Southern California from 2007 to 2009. She then worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York until 2011. This is a very important bank in the United States.

Later, she returned to teaching. She was a professor at the City University of New York from 2011 to 2015. In 2015, she moved back to Japan to teach at Keio University. Today, she is a professor at the University of Tokyo.

In 2016, Sagiri Kitao received the Nakahara Prize. She was the first woman ever to win this important award for economists in Japan.

Teaching Students

Professor Kitao has taught many classes about Macroeconomics at top universities. Macroeconomics is the study of how a country's economy works as a whole. This includes things like jobs, prices, and how much money people earn.

At New York University, she taught advanced macroeconomics to students studying for their doctorates. At Keio University in Japan, she taught both undergraduate and graduate students. These courses covered topics like money, banking, and how different countries' economies interact.

At the University of Tokyo, she teaches about international finance. This is about how money moves between countries. She also teaches about complex economic models to graduate students. Her teaching helps many students learn about the economy.

Her Research Work

Sagiri Kitao's research mainly focuses on macroeconomics. She studies many interesting topics that affect people's lives. These include:

• How taxes on income work.
• How wealth is shared among people and why some people have more than others.
• Social security (money for retired or disabled people).
• Health insurance and unemployment insurance.
• How populations change over time (like more older people).
• Starting new businesses (entrepreneurship).
• The economy of Japan.

She has done a lot of research about Japan. Since 2015, she has written several papers about different government policies that affect Japan. For example, she studied how delaying changes to the pension system (money for retired people) could affect future generations in Japan. She found that waiting too long could make taxes higher and reduce people's well-being.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Kitao also researched its effects. She studied how the pandemic changed the job market in Japan. Her work showed that it made inequality worse for many people. This research was published in a book about the economics of the COVID-19 crisis.