Nakahara Prize goes to Hoshi.

Takeo Hoshi, an NBER Research Associate from the University of California, San Diego, won the Japan Economic Association's 2005 Nakahara Prize. The prize is awarded every year to honor one outstanding Japanese economist under the age of 45. The committee cited Hoshi's work on the Japanese banking system. They said "he has been the forefront of analyzing both theoretical and empirical issues of the Japanese banking problem in the 1990s. He analyzed how the once highly regarded bank-centered Japanese financial system has become a liability to the entire economy." Since the founding of the award in 1995, Hoshi becomes the fourth NBER economist to win it.

In 1995, Fumio Hayashi of the University of Tokyo was chosen by the committee for his work in macroeconomics, particularly for making a "major contribution to our understanding of the rational expectations hypothesis by creating new inference methods and applying them to U.S. and Japanese data on consumption." In 1997, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki of the London School of Economics was chosen for making "several outstanding contributions in the areas of macroeconomics and monetary economics by creating innovative original models and, thereby presenting new insights to old questions." In 2001, Charles Y. Horioka of Osaka University was selected for "several outstanding contributions in the areas of international capital flows and saving and consumption in Japan."

It is quite remarkable that four NBER Research Associates have won this important prize in the ten years since it began, as there are only a small number of Japanese NBER researchers who are eligible for this prize.