Professor Hidehiko Ichimura recently visited Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya from 5th – 8th September to share some of the results and his experiences in the field of econometrics and survey design and implementation. Professor Ichimura, professor of economics at the University of Tokyo since 2005, received his BA in Economics from Osaka University and his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States. He is the project leader of the ongoing study “Towards a Comprehensive Resolution of the Social Security Problem: A new economics of aging” at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) which collects the panel data: Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR). His research area focuses on the development of program evaluation methods as well as the examination of conditions under which various estimation problems are considered in econometrics.

As part of a workshop on statistics, Professor Ichimura made a presentation on the 6th September on the methodological issues regarding semiparametric estimators for the econometricians at the Faculty. His presentation was based on his work with Professor Whitney Newey from the Economics Departement of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their research explores the usages of the influence function of semiparametric estimators, the ways in which it can be calculated and examines the conditions for the validity of the influence function calculation, such as Frechet differentiability, nonparametric convergence rates, stochastic equicontinuity, and small bias conditions.

He also gave a seminar on the 7th September entitled “An Outline and Characteristics of the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR)”. He discussed the economic and social problems caused by population aging in Japan and other developed countries, the composition and development of the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR), as well as on the recent research results obtained by our project members utilizing JSTAR data, while pointing out the usefulness of such type of a survey in terms of understanding population heterogeneity and assessing policy effects. These studies offer a useful feedback to policy makers working on countering the effects of population aging, such as labor force shortage and rising public pension and health expenditure.