Toshiaki Shoji received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Tokyo in 2019 and won a President’s Award for his undergraduate thesis in 2014. He is currently an associate professor of economics at Seikei University in Japan. Building on this background, he has conducted several empirical studies, primarily using store scanner data. Some of these studies have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals. The first paper (Shoji, Review of Income and Wealth 2026) examines purchasing behavior in response to Japan’s consumption tax hike in 2014. Using scanner data with consumer identifiers, he constructed monthly purchasing records of 400,000 consumers and examined their purchasing behavior. The analysis shows that some consumers faced liquidity constraints when engaging in intertemporal substitution.
The second paper (Shoji, Journal of Macroeconomics 2022) examines firms’ price-setting behavior around the 2014 consumption tax hike. This paper utilizes daily scanner data from approximately 300 supermarkets to analyze the degree of pass-through of the tax hike. The results show that more than half of grocery prices experienced complete pass-through, while the rest experienced incomplete or more than complete pass-through. The latter finding means that firms adjusted their tax-excluded prices in response to the tax increase. The third paper (Shoji, Empirical Economics 2024) computes the consumer-specific price index and inflation rates, and examines differences across age groups. The main finding is that consumers around the retirement age face a lower inflation rate than working-age consumers. This is consistent with the argument that retired consumers spare more time for shopping and search for low-priced goods.
These research papers have been published in academic journals and are recognized within the economics community. Earlier versions of the papers were presented at several international conferences, including the American Economic Association Annual Meeting and the French-Japanese Webinar in Economics, where they received international attention. In addition to these papers, he also conducted empirical studies using credit card transaction data, venture capital investment data, and historical JGB yield data.