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Taipei Guest House, 2015

Tomoo Kikuchi/菊地朋生 

Professor, Waseda University, Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies

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Introduction 

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My main research areas are International Macroeconomics and Economic Growth and Development (Google Scholar). 

My main research question has been how global capital markets influence economic development of countries.  

I have obtained my PhD from Bielefeld University in 2006 with a dissertation on "Inequality of Nations, Endogenous Fluctuations, and Financial Market Globalization." You can find me in the Mathematics Geneology Project. My academic father is Volker Böhm and my academic grandfather is Gérard Debreu.

At the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific, Waseda University I offer two courses "Regional Integration in the Global Economy" and "Financial Globalization and Economic Development". If you are considering to join my ゼミ "International Economics" (choosing me as your Master thesis advisor), you might want to read my interview with AERA進学Mook or watch me on Faculty Spotlight on YouTube. I also take on PhD students who want to specialize in "International Macroeconomics". I host the WIAPS Colloquium Series on Global Capital Market and Economic Development in Asia. The seminars are open to public, please check the website for details. 

My Research


My theoretical and empirical work is broadly on international capital flows, bubbles and production networks. I have also started a project that applies game theory to understand international relations. My policy work focuses more broadly on trade and investment in East Asia and the Japanese economy. 

 

International capital flows

Theoretical work 

Financial market imperfections lead to higher than optimal saving and cause capital flows from poor to rich countries (confirmed in a panel analysis in Brueckner et al. 2023), which results in cross country income differences in the long run (see Kikuchi and Stachurski, 2009). Under certain parameter conditions (bifurcation analysis) endogenous cycle emerges leading to permanent fluctuations of international capital flows (see Kikuchi and Stachurski, 2009; Kikuchi and Vachadze, 2018, Kikuchi et al. 2018).


Empirical work 

In a panel analysis we find that an increase in foreign debt, in response to a decrease in the sovereign credit default swap, leads to an increase in investment and GDP growth (see Kikuchi and Tobe 2021). This is in line with our theoretical finding above.  In a firm-level dataset on outbound multinational activity from China we find that the establishment of a Big-5 bank subsidiary or branch is associated with a significant increase in subsequent years in Chinese firms' likelihood to establish an overseas subsidiary in that host country (see Chor et al. 2018). This suggests that Chinese banks establish overseas subsidiaries to circumvent the kind of financial imperfections identified in our theoretical models.  


Bubbles

Theoretical work 

Asset price bubbles can crowd in investment when financial market imperfections suppress capital accumulation by increasing national saving (see Hillebrand et al. 2018). Bubbles in capital goods can crowd in investment in a small open economy by absorbing international capital flows when the capital goods can be used as collateral (see Kikuchi and Thepmongkol, 2020). Similarly, bubbles can emerge in utility-yielding goods such as housing when banks take housing as collateral (see Hillebrand and Kikuchi, 2015).

 

Production networks

Theoretical work 

When firms have a convex cost function and face market transaction costs they produce at a point where the marginal costs of in-house and market-based operations are equalized. In such model the scale of production gets larger as firms are located more downstream resulting in hierarchical production networks (see Kikuchi et al. 2018). The decentralized market solution can be obtained by a central planer solving a dynamic programming problem. The model can be applied to explain the size distribution of management layers as well as cities among others (see Kikuchi et al. 2020).

 

Selected Publications 

Tomoo Kikuchi, Kazuo Nishimura, John Stachurski and Junnan Zhang 

Journal of Economic Theory, 196, 105287, 2021. 

Tomoo Kikuchi and Athakrit Thepmongkol

Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 52, 2085-2109, 2020. 

Tomoo Kikuchi, John Stachurski and George Vachadze

Journal of Economic Theory, 176, 170-192, 2018.

Tomoo Kikuchi, Kazuo Nishimura and John Stachurski

Theoretical Economics, 13, 729-760, 2018.

Tomoo Kikuchi and John Stachurski

Journal of Economic Theory, 144, 1560-1571, 2009.

Tomoo Kikuchi 

Journal of Economic Theory, 139, 310-335, 2008.

Past Talks