Toru Kitagawa is a Professor of Economics at Brown University. His research and teaching interests include econometrics, causal inference, statistical decision theory, Bayesian analysis, applied microeconomics, empirical macroeconomics, and experimental economics. His research projects center on how to use data to inform a better public policy. He studies theoretical econometrics and statistics to develop quantitative methods for evidence based policy decision, with applications to a wide range of applied economics including labor, development, and environmental economics. He also collaborates with empirical researchers in the world to conduct lab and field experiments to perform econometric analysis on human behaviors and learn better policies for real-world problems. He has published his works in major peer-reviewed journals in economics including Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Econometrics, Quantitative Economics, and Journal of Business Economics and Statistics. He served as a board member of the Review of Economic Studies and an associate editor for Journal of Econometrics, and has been an associate editor of Journal of Business Economics and Statistics, Journal of Econometric Methods, and Japanese Economic Review.
In 2024, one of Kitagawa's papers coauthored with Raffaella Giacomini was awarded the inaugural Haavelmo prize, the award for a best econometrics paper published in Econometrica in the previous 4 years. In 2023, Kitagawa was awarded the Nakahara prize, an award given to best Japanese economist under the age of 45. He has won an NSF grant (2024 - 27) and a Horizon 2020 starting grant (2017-22) from European Research Council. Before joining Brown in 2021, he was Professor of Economics at University College London. He is affiliated as Research Staff at Center for Microeconometrics Methods and Practice (Cemmap), Research Fellow at Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), and Researcher at Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). He holds Ph.D and M.A both in Economics from Brown University and B.A. in Engineering from the University of Tokyo.
