Emi Nakamura

• 1. Introduction

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  Emi Nakamura's grandfather, Guy Orcutt, was an economist. Her parents, Alice Nakamura and Masao Nakamura, were economists too. By the time she enrolled at Princeton University in the late 1990s, economics was a language her family had spoken across three generations. Today she holds the E. Morris Cox Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. She co-edits the American Economic Review and co-directs the Monetary Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She built that standing on an unusual practice. Rather than working with whatever data already existed, she went searching for evidence nobody had thought to use. What do prices actually reveal about an economy? Does government spending genuinely lift output, and by how much? Finding answers required acquiring a particular kind of training, under supervisors who were already asking the same questions.

• 2. Foundations

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  At Princeton University, Nakamura's senior thesis carried an unusual title for an undergraduate: 'An Economy with Monetary Business Cycles.' She wrote it under the supervision of Michael Woodford and graduated summa cum laude in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics.

  From Princeton she moved to Harvard University to pursue a doctorate, working under two supervisors: Robert Barro and Ariel Pakes. Her dissertation was titled 'Price Adjustment, Pass-through and Monetary Policy,' and she completed it in 2007. During those doctoral years she also served as a teaching fellow. Her focus on how prices adjust to monetary conditions would soon lead to a collaboration with Jón Steinsson. Their joint work would become her most widely cited research.

• 3. What Price Changes Hide

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  Jón Steinsson is not only Nakamura's most frequent research collaborator. He is also her husband, and together they have two children. Their partnership produced her most cited work: the paper known as 'Five facts about prices.' To write it, they turned to microdata from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That data offered a granular record of actual prices, one that had not previously been applied to these macroeconomic questions. What they found was striking. A large share of what the data recorded as price changes were temporary sales: discounts planned far in advance, not responses to shifting economic conditions. That distinction cut to the heart of how economists model prices. Even if prices appear to change frequently in the raw data, the underlying pricing structure can be much more rigid than it appears. This finding proved compatible with new Keynesian macroeconomic models, which incorporate microeconomic theories of firm behavior into larger accounts of how economies work. The paper has been widely cited in macroeconomics textbooks. Nakamura and Steinsson were not finished with big questions. Their next collaboration took aim at something that had long resisted measurement: the true size of the government spending multiplier.

• 4. The Multiplier Problem

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  'Fiscal stimulus in a monetary union,' co-authored with Steinsson, set out to measure something economists had long argued about: the government spending multiplier. Nakamura and Steinsson exploited a feature of American defense contracting. Military spending is distributed unevenly across states. When one state receives a surge in defense contracts, that creates a natural experiment. By tracking how output moved in high-spending states relative to others, the researchers could isolate the multiplier. They avoided the confounds that make national-level estimates so contested. Their answer came back substantially higher than one. That means each dollar of government spending produced more than one dollar of additional economic output. The result confirmed what Keynesian theory had predicted: fiscal stimulus can have substantial effects on output. Those effects are strongest when interest rates have already been cut to their lower limit, a condition economists call the zero lower bound. The paper continues to be cited in policy discussions long after its publication. In 2014, the International Monetary Fund placed Nakamura's name on its list of the top 25 economists under the age of 45.

• 5. A Decade of Recognition

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  The Elaine Bennett Research Prize came to Nakamura in 2014. The American Economic Association awarded her the John Bates Clark Medal. Their citation credited her with having 'greatly increased our understanding of price-setting by firms and the effects of monetary and fiscal policies.' It also commended her 'creativity in suggesting new sources of data to address long-standing questions.' In 2018, The Economist named her among the decade's eight best young economists. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2021, she became a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Her earlier career had also been supported by a National Science Foundation Career Grant and a Sloan Research Fellowship.

  In August 2025, Nakamura appeared on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast during the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium. She was there to present her paper 'Beyond the Taylor Rule.' That paper's focus on central bank credibility places a new empirical lens on the same institutions whose policies she first explored in her doctoral dissertation.