The Japanese Economic Review Vol. 49, No. 1, March 1998 1997 JEA±Nakahara Prize: Announcement

By MASAHIRO OKUNO-FUJIWARA University of Tokyo

We are pleased to announce that the 1997 JEA±Nakahara Prize has been awarded to Professor Nobuhiro Kiyotaki. Born in 1955, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki took his BA from the University of Tokyo in 1978 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1985. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota and the London School of Economics and Political Science. At present, he is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Professor Kiyotaki has made several outstanding contributions in the areas of macroeconomics and monetary economics by creating innovative original models and, thereby, presenting new insights to old questions. First, he provided a new justi®cation for active monetary policy by formulating a macroeconomic model based upon monopolistic competition, where monetary policy plays a role of coordinating activities to choose an equilibrium with higher output. Second, he constructed a search-theoretic model of money where ®at money serves as a medium of exchange for multilateral exchange, where people accept money not because it is required by a technical reason (e.g. by cash constraint) but simply because they believe others would accept money as well. Third, he formulated a model with credit contracts with limited enforcement where land plays two distinct roles: the role of collateral for debt and the role of a productive input. In such an economy, the level of credit limit to each ®rm positively depends upon the value of land, while the credit provided to each ®rm stimulates the demand for land. His main works are as follows:

``Monopolistic Competition and the Effects of Aggregate Demand'', American Economic Review, Vol. 77, 1987, pp. 647±666 (with O. Blanchard). ``Multiple Expectational Equilibria under Monopolistic Competition'', Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 103, 1988, pp. 695±713. ``On Money as a Medium of Exchange'', Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 97, 1989, pp. 927±954 (with R. Wright). ``A Search-Theoretic Approach to Monetary Economics'', American Economic Review, Vol. 83 (1), 1993, pp. 63±77 (with R. Wright). ``Credit Cycles'', Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 105, 1995, pp. 211±248 (with J. Moore).

Members of 1997 JEA±Nakahara Prize Selection Committee

Masahiro Okuno-Fujiwara, University of Tokyo (Chair) Keimei Kaizuka, Chuo University (1996 JEA President) Anthony Atkinson, Oxford University Michio Hatanaka, Tezukayama University (1996 Chair of this committee) Dale Jorgenson, Harvard University Paul Krugman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kazuo Nishimura, Kyoto University

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# Japanese Economic Association 1998 Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.