Top Global University Project: Waseda Goes Global - A Plan to Build a Worldwide Academic Network That Is Open, Dynamic and DiverseWaseda University

Unit

Positive/Empirical Analysis of Political Economy

Aiming to Become the World’s Cutting-Edge Center for Empirical Research in Political Economics

Empirical analysis in political economics and empirical studies on companies

Our network

Since the early 2000s, Waseda University’s School of Political Science and Economics (PSE) and Graduate Schools of Political Science and Economics (GSPS and GSE) have integrated political science and economics, as political scientists and economists joined efforts to incorporate their international perspectives. In the process, we established a base for political economic studies under the auspices of two programs sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), namely, the 21st Century Center of Excellence Program and the Global Center of Excellence Program. Also, a series of research projects proposed by our researchers have been awarded Kakenhi grants-in-aid for scientific research under the MEXT-sponsored competitive research funding program, one project selected for category (S) and four others for category (A). Building upon this track record, we have been training young researchers to become internationally competitive. Our achievements in these projects include creating politico-economic experiments and developing a laptop-based nationwide opinion survey known as the computer assisted self-interviewing (CASI) survey, which is the first of its kind in the world that conducts top-level opinion surveys and experimental research. Furthermore, we have been making steady progress in the areas of experimental economics research with applications of game theory, politico-economic analysis utilizing applied and theoretical economics, and development economics utilizing quantitative analysis, and have built a proprietary database containing data on corporate governance and business finance in Japan, a project led mainly by the School of Commerce (SOC) and the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS). Taking full advantage of data thus made available, our researchers have conducted a series of empirical studies and had their findings published both in Japan and abroad. Going forward, we strive to train excellent young researchers, brought together from Japan and overseas, from a systematic and global point of view so that they can gain skills necessary to compete on the global stage.

Global environment and perspective to promote education in political economics and business

At Waseda University’s Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Faculty of Commerce, and WIAS, we offer degree programs in which students can earn a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree entirely in English, thereby creating a center of learning for students from all over the world. Meanwhile, WIAS has implemented dynamic faculty personnel policies, having introduced open international recruitment and tenure track positions for the first time at Waseda University. As part of our efforts to train and produce future leaders in politico-economic research, we are promoting collaboration with a series of overseas universities, including Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California in the United States; Tilburg University in the Netherlands; and the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. In particular, an intensive course by Stanford University and summer school by Essex University are offered on our campus. Meanwhile, in training researchers in empirical analysis of corporate governance and behavior, we have been collaborating with Oxford University’s Saïd Business School in the UK, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in France, the University of British Columbia in Canada, the Free University of Berlin in Germany, and so forth. We are planning to invite researchers specialized in conducting empirical studies on companies from these institutions mentioned above as well as from those in Asia, including Seoul National University in South Korea, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Nankai University in China, and Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, to jointly develop data using the same analytical procedures.

Cutting-edge center for both education and research

By utilizing the visiting professorship program as a short-term measure and increasing the number of joint faculty appointments with the world’s leading universities in the long run, we strive to train leaders and researchers capable of working at the global forefront of politico-economic research, of playing their part in achieving global governance, and of taking the lead in business economics. In previous years, we have invited visiting professors from Stanford University, the University of Milan in Italy, Tilburg University, and the University of Essex on a mid-term basis, and from the University of Southern California and Bowdoin College in the United States on a longer term. As for joint appointments, we have Associate Professor Hiroki Sayama of the State University of New York at Binghamton with us for this academic year, and we will invite two scholars for the academic year 2018–19.

On the research front, we have been working to develop one of the world’s cutting-edge CASI opinion surveys to help build institutional mechanisms and formulate policy measures that can accommodate the needs of global citizens. We will further proceed with politico-economic experiments, which provide the basis for such endeavor, with the aim of becoming a global center for research in this field. We are already making remarkable achievements in the areas of international political science and economy, international security, development economics, experimental economics, and applied and theoretical economics. In the area of empirical studies on companies, we will expand the scope of analysis to include not only corporate governance and business finance but also organizational structure, strategy choices, and accounting behavior, thereby aiming to become a global center in this field as well.

 

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