Emi Nakamura

Nakamura's landmark work with Jón Steinsson on price stickiness used detailed supermarket scanner and BLS micro-data to demonstrate that prices change far less frequently than standard macroeconomic models assumed, with median durations substantially longer than earlier studies found. This research fundamentally reshaped how economists calibrate models of monetary policy transmission.

Nakamura is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has spent much of her academic career. She also serves as co-director of the macroeconomics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research alongside Jón Steinsson.

Yes, Nakamura received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2019, awarded annually by the American Economic Association to an American economist under forty. She became only the second woman to receive the medal, following Susan Athey who won it in 2007.

Nakamura and Steinsson exploit geographic variation in U.S. military spending across states to estimate fiscal multipliers, finding that the local government spending multiplier is approximately 1.5. This approach treats differential military spending across states as a natural experiment that helps identify the causal effects of government spending on output.