I am professor of economics and East Asian studies. Currently, I am serving as the Director of Fries Center for Global Studies. I received his PhD from University of California, Davis, and his BA from University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. My research focuses on banking and has been published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics; Journal of Banking and Finance; Journal of Development Economics; Journal of Financial Intermediations Journal of Law and Economics; Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; Journal of Public Economics; and Journal of Urban Economics as well as other scholarly journals and book chapters. I have been a research fellow at Tokyo Center for Economics Research (TECR) since 2014. I was a research fellow at the Center for Financial Research at Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 2008 and at the Center for International Research on the Japanese Economy (CIRJE) at University of Tokyo in 2018. I was awarded the most significant paper published in 2012 in Journal of Financial Intermediation. I teach courses on Introduction to Economic Theory, Macroeconomic Analysis, Money, Banking and Financial Markets, Economy of Japan, Economies of East Asia, and Quantitative Methods in Economics.