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Saito Yuta

Faculty of Public Policy　Public Policy　Public PolicyAssociate Professor

Researcher basic information

■ Degree
  • Master of Science (Economics）, University of Mannheim, Jun. 2018
  • Doctor of Philosophy (Economics）, Sophia University, Sep. 2020
■ URL
researchmap URLホームページURL■ Various IDs
Researcher number
  • 80847822
ORCID IDJ-Global ID■ Research Keywords and Fields
Research Keyword
  • Public Economics
  • Macroeconomics
  • Optimal Taxation
  • Monetary Policy
■ Educational Organization

Career

■ Career
Career
  • Nov. 2024 - Present
    Hokkaido University, Graduate School of Economics and Business, Associate Professor
  • Apr. 2022 - Oct. 2024
    Hokkaido University, Graduate School of Economics and Business, Assistant Professor
  • Apr. 2019 - Mar. 2022
    Kobe International University, Faculty of Economics, Assistant Professor

Research activity information

■ Papers
  • The irrelevance of targeted paternalism in Pareto efficient income taxation
    Yuta Saito
    Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5978174 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5978174, Elsevier BV, Jan. 2026, [Lead author, Last author, Corresponding author]
    Paternalistic policies often (i) target specific groups, such as low-income workers, and (ii) are defended using conservative 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.
  • Taxing platforms with multi-homing
    Yuta Saito; Yeming Zhang
    Mathematical Social Sciences, 102478, 102478, Elsevier BV, Nov. 2025, [Peer-reviewed], [Lead author, Corresponding author], [International Magazine]
    Scientific journal, This paper investigates the effects of taxation on two-sided platforms, where some agents participate in a single platform (single-homing) and others engage with multiple platforms simultaneously (multi-homing) on both sides of the market (sellers and buyers). Agents’ homing choices are determined endogenously by platform pricing, while platforms set prices in response to ad valorem and unit taxes. We show that raising taxes on one side increases equilibrium prices on both the taxed and untaxed sides. Moreover, the unit tax burden is shared between platforms and users, making taxation more effective at reducing platform profits under multi-homing. This occurs because taxation lowers the number of multi-homers on the taxed side while raising their number on the untaxed side, which in turn prompts platforms to increase prices on the untaxed side. Finally, our welfare analysis identifies the optimal share of multi-homers that maximizes total surplus and clarifies when taxation improves overall welfare.

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  • Exit expectations and the optimal design of a currency union
    Yuta Saito
    Economics Letters, 247, 112143, 112143, Elsevier BV, Feb. 2025, [Peer-reviewed], [Lead author, Corresponding author], [International Magazine]
    Scientific journal, This paper explores the impact of exit expectations on the optimal design of a currency union. The union is composed of core member countries, which face the time-inconsistency problem, and peripheral countries, which do not. Peripheral members play a crucial role as a commitment mechanism, enhancing the policy credibility of core countries. We demonstrate that an increase in exit expectations leads to a higher optimal number of peripheral members from the perspective of the core countries. This suggests that heterogeneous membership may be advantageous, particularly in times of political uncertainty when the public anticipates potential exits from the currency union.

    Preprint
  • Expectations for the MPC chair and interest rate persistence
    Yuta Saito
    Mathematical Social Sciences, 128, 25, 30, Elsevier BV, Mar. 2024, [Peer-reviewed], [Lead author, Corresponding author], [International Magazine]
    Scientific journal, This paper examines how the public’s expectations for the chair of the monetary policy committee influence policy outcomes. We show that the expectation that the chair will propose their ideal policy at the meeting can lead a majority of the committee to reject the policy change. The result suggests that the expectation of the chair’s agenda setting is a determinant of interest rate persistence.

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  • Time Inconsistency of Monetary Policy and Self-Fulfilling Expectations of Monetary Union Exits
    Yuta Saito
    2024
  • Capital taxation with parental incentives
    Yuta Saito; Yosuke Takeda
    Journal of Public Economic Theory, 24, 6, 1310, 1341, Wiley, Dec. 2022, [Peer-reviewed], [Lead author], [International Magazine]
    Scientific journal, This paper studies capital taxation in an overlapping generation model where parents regard their children as impatient. The intergenerational time-preference heterogeneity leads parents to engage in parental monetary transfers designed to encourage their children's asset accumulation (i.e., parental transfers which amount are contingent on the children's savings). In this setup, the utilitarian government's time preference is higher than that of the child generation but lower than that of the parent generation. Hence, from the government's perspective, the strategic parental transfers give too many incentives to accumulate assets. As a result, the government imposes a positive marginal tax on assets to disincentivize the younger generation's saving motives. By contrast, if parents do not have paternalistic preferences and do not make strategic parental transfers, the government imposes a zero marginal tax on assets.

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  • A Note on Time Inconsistency and Endogenous Exits from a Currency Union
    Yuta Saito
    Games, 13, 2, 21, 21, MDPI AG, Feb. 2022, [Peer-reviewed], [Lead author], [International Magazine]
    Scientific journal, This paper investigates the effects of members’ exits from a currency union on the credibility of the common currency. In our currency union model, the inflation rate of the common currency is determined by majority voting among N member countries that are heterogeneous with respect to their output shocks. Once an inflation rate of the common currency has been selected, each member decides whether to remain in the currency union or not. If a member decides to exit, it has to pay a fixed social cost and individually chooses the inflation rate of its currency. Unlike previous research on this topic, we focus on the possibility of achieving an optimal outcome, which generates no inflation bias, when more than one member is expected to leave the currency union. We show that the optimal outcome can only be achieved if no members leave the currency union.

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  • The role of vaccination in a model of asset pricing during a pandemic
    Yuta Saito
    PLOS ONE, 17, 4, e0266511, e0266511, Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2022, [Peer-reviewed], [Lead author], [International Magazine]
    Scientific journal, This paper examines the effect of pandemic vaccination on asset prices in a simple asset pricing model à la Lucas (1978). In this model, asset prices depend on susceptible individuals’ saving motives to insure against a reduction in labour income due to getting the virus. Hence distributing vaccine reduces precautionary saving motives and asset prices. This implies that reducing the income gap between susceptible and infected individuals, such as by cash handouts, eases the negative effect of vaccine supply on asset prices.

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  • Parental transfers under ambiguity
    Yuta Saito
    Applied Economics Letters, 29, 9, 773, 779, Informa {UK} Limited, 2022, [Peer-reviewed], [Lead author], [International Magazine]
    Scientific journal, This note introduces parental uncertainty into parent–child monetary transfers. A parent questions the probability distribution of a child’s future economic success. As a result, the parent endogenously tilts his/her subjective probability model away from an approximating probability model. In this case, parental transfers increase with model uncertainty, thereby reducing the child’s effort and probability of economic success. This theoretical result raises several empirical questions, of which two are as follows. For one thing, informed parents (e.g. those who hold the same job as their child) transfer less money, and their child exerts more effort. Another is that economic uncertainty (e.g. recessions or pandemics) prompts higher parental transfer payments and reduces the child’s effort.

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  • Asset pricing during pandemic lockdown
    Yuta Saito; Jun Sakamoto
    Research in International Business and Finance, 58, 101449, 101449, Elsevier BV, Dec. 2021, [Peer-reviewed], [Lead author], [International Magazine]
    Scientific journal, This paper examines the implications of lockdown policies during early stages of pandemics for asset prices. We build a simple susceptible-infected-recovered model with microeconomic foundations, which allows us to obtain qualitative results with economic implications. In our model, lockdown policies reduce (i) labour income by decreasing working hours and (ii) precautionary savings by decreasing susceptible agents’ probability of getting infected in the future. We qualitatively show that strengthening lockdown measures negatively impacts asset prices at the time of implementation. Our empirical analysis using data from advanced countries supports this finding. Depending on parameter values, our numerical analysis displays a V-shaped recovery of asset prices and an L-shaped recession of consumption. The rapid recovery of asset prices occurs only if the lockdown policies are insufficiently stringent to reduce the number of new periodic cases. This finding implies the possibility that lenient lockdowns have contributed to rapid stock market recovery at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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  • Essays on Political Economy of Capital Taxation and Monetary Policy
    Yuta Saito
    Sep. 2020
    Doctoral thesis

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  • Political Representation and Legislative Bargaining over Redistribution
    Yuta Saito
    International Advances in Economic Research, 25, 3, 251, 262, Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 01 Aug. 2019, [Lead author], [International Magazine]
    Scientific journal

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  • Bargaining over monetary policy and optimal committee composition in a currency union
    Yuta Saito
    Economics Bulletin, 38, 4, 1986, 1996, 2018, [Peer-reviewed], [Lead author]

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■ Other Activities and Achievements
  • Historical Relationships and International Market Return Predictability: The Role of the UK in the Former British Colonies, Protectorates and Mandates
    Takuro Hidaka; Yuta Saito; Jun Sakamoto, Discussion Papers in Economics and Business 21-08-Rev, Osaka University, Graduate School of Economics, Oct. 2023
  • A Model of Intergenerational Legislative Bargaining over Redistribution
    Yuta Saito, Kobe International University Review, 101, Jun. 2021
    English
  • A Note on Policy (In) Variance of Risk Aversion
    Yuta Saito, Kobe International University Review, 101, Jun. 2021
    English
■ Lectures, oral presentations, etc.
  • Exit Expectations, Time Inconsistency and the Optimal Design of a Currency Union
    Yuta Saito
    American Economic Association (Online), Jan. 2022, English
    Jan. 2022, United States, [International presentation]
  • Capital Income Taxation with Parental Incentives
    Yuta Saito; Yosuke Takeda
    American Economic Association (Atlanta), Jan. 2019, English
    United States, [International presentation]
  • Optimal Income Taxation in an OLG Economy with Parental Transfers
    Yosuke Takeda; Yuta Saito
    Western Economic Association International (Singapore), Jan. 2016, English
    Singapore, [International presentation]
■ Syllabus
  • 現代経済経営演習, 2024年, 博士後期課程, 経済学院
  • 現代経済経営演習Ⅰ, 2024年, 修士課程, 経済学院
  • 現代経済経営演習Ⅱ, 2024年, 修士課程, 経済学院
  • 公共経済学, 2024年, 学士課程, 経済学部
  • 経済学応用Ⅱ, 2024年, 学士課程, 経済学部
  • 英語演習, 2024年, 学士課程, 全学教育
■ Affiliated academic society
  • Econometric Society
  • Japanese Economic Association
  • Association for Public Economic Theory
  • American Economic Association
■ Research Themes