Yuta Saito
Associate Professor of Economics at Hokkaido University
Academic Career
Studied Economics at Sophia University and the University of Mannheim. Received a Ph.D. in 2020. Academic positions at Hokkaido University (since 2022) and Kobe International University (2019–2022).
Research Fields
Public Economics; Macroeconomics; Social Choice
Research Projects
[Current] Paternalistic Optimal Taxation; Non-Welfarist Social Evaluation
[Previous] Platform Taxation; Monetary Policy Committee Design; Currency Union Design; Capital Taxation; Bequests; Asset Pricing; Legislative Bargaining
Working Papers & Work in Progress
The Irrelevance of Targeted Paternalism in Pareto Efficient Income Taxation (2025). [PDF]
[Abstract] Paternalistic policies often (i) target specific groups, such as low-income workers, and (ii) are defended using criteria requiring that policy changes improve the targeted group’s well-being without harming non-targeted individuals. In a Mirrleesian optimal taxation framework, the paper shows that when the self-selection constraint binds, introducing such targeted paternalism does not affect the constrained Pareto-efficient allocation. The result highlights a limit of evidence-based justifications for paternalistic policies: the emergence of new evidence that an intervention raises a particular well-being measure for one group without harming others does not, by itself, warrant policy change once incentive constraints are taken seriously. The paper also clarifies that expressing the optimal tax formula as the sum of a standard Mirrleesian term and a paternalism term does not always imply that changes in paternalistic concerns alter optimal marginal income tax rates.
Non-Paternalistic Replication of Paternalistic Social Welfare Functions (joint with Kenzo Ichikawa)
Publications
Taxing Platforms with Multi-Homing (joint with Yeming Zhang). Mathematical Social Sciences (2026). [WP Version]
Exit Expectations and the Optimal Design of a Currency Union. Economics Letters (2025). [WP Version]
Expectations for the MPC Chair and Interest Rate Persistence. Mathematical Social Sciences (2024). [Open Access]
Capital Taxation with Parental Incentives (joint with Yosuke Takeda). Journal of Public Economic Theory (2022). [WP Version]
A Note on Time Inconsistency and Endogenous Exits From a Currency Union. Games (2022). [Open Access]
The Role of Vaccination in a Model of Asset Pricing During a Pandemic. PLoS ONE (2022). [Open Access]
Parental Transfers Under Ambiguity. Applied Economics Letters (2022). [WP Version]
Asset Pricing During Pandemic Lockdown (joint with Jun Sakamoto). Research in International Business and Finance (2021). [Open Access]
Political Representation and Legislative Bargaining over Redistribution. International Advances in Economic Research (2019). [WP Version]
Bargaining over Monetary Policy and Optimal Committee Composition in a Currency Union. Economics Bulletin (2018). [Open Access]
Contact
Yuta Saito
Faculty of Economics and Business
Hokkaido University
Kita 9, Nishi 7, Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-0809
Hokkaido, Japan