Emi Nakamura graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2001. Her senior thesis was titled An Economy with Monetary Business Cycles and she received supervision from Michael Woodford during that undergraduate period.
Emi Nakamura earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2007. Her doctoral dissertation bore the name Price Adjustment, Pass-through and Monetary Policy under the supervision of Robert Barro and Ariel Pakes.
The American Economic Association awarded Emi Nakamura the John Bates Clark Medal for greatly increasing understanding of price-setting by firms. The citation also noted her work on the effects of monetary and fiscal policies on those settings.
Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson published their most cited paper Five facts about prices using microdata from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to analyze price changes. Their research showed many measured price changes resulted from temporary sales scheduled far in advance.
In 2019 Emi Nakamura was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She previously received the Elaine Bennett Research Prize in 2014 and became a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2021.