Tomohiro Hirano

Overview

Tomohiro Hirano is a Japanese macroeconomist, currently Associate Professor of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, a Research Associate at the Centre for Macroeconomics at the London School of Economics, and a Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies (Tokyo).[1][2][3] He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Tokyo, where he began his academic career, and his research specializes in asset-price bubbles, liquidity, and financial regulation within formal overlapping-generations (OLG) macro models.[4]

Before his sustained collaboration with Joseph Stiglitz, Hirano built his reputation with Noriyuki Yanagawa — most notably "Asset Bubbles, Endogenous Growth, and Financial Frictions," published in the Review of Economic Studies 84(1) (2017), a widely cited paper on how rational asset-price bubbles can coexist with, and even support, productive investment under credit constraints — and with Masaru Inaba and Yanagawa on "Asset Bubbles and Bailouts," Journal of Monetary Economics 76 (2015).[5][6] This earlier body of work on bubbles-and-growth interactions is the direct methodological ancestor of the land-speculation research program he later built with Stiglitz.

The Hirano-Stiglitz Research Program (2022–2026)

Since at least 2022, Hirano has co-authored with Stiglitz a sustained, technically demanding sequence of papers using OLG models to formalize how land speculation, credit, and monetary/fiscal policy interact to shape long-run economic growth and macroeconomic fluctuations — the most developed body of formal macroeconomic theory connecting land markets to growth currently on this wiki. The program's papers, as covered here:

• Land Speculation and Wobbly Dynamics with Endogenous Phase Transitions (2022) — the foundational land-and-capital model of endogenous boom-bust land-price cycles.
• The Wobbly Economy: Global Dynamics with Phase and State Transitions (2022) — the general (land-free) mathematical mechanism underlying the above.
• Credit, Land Speculation, and Long-Run Economic Growth / Low-Interest-Rate Policy (2024–2025) — sectoral credit composition as the key growth determinant; a land tax redirecting credit raises the growth rate.
• Growth and Fluctuations in Economies with Land Speculation (2025) — land substantially widens the range of possible fluctuations; accommodative policy can backfire when credit constraints bind.
• Overlapping Generations Models, Multiplicity of Steady States and Momentary Equilibria, and Economic Fluctuations (2025) — the general mathematical foundation proving multiplicity is a structural OLG possibility, not a land-specific artifact.
• Henry George, Land Speculation, and Economic Growth and Transformation (2025) — the program's flagship, explicitly Georgist-titled paper, published in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.

Read together, this is a coherent multi-year project: two general theoretical foundations (the "wobbly economy" and OLG-multiplicity papers), two land-and-credit applications, and a policy-facing synthesis that engages Henry George's argument directly. The wiki treats this as its primary source base for formal, contemporary macroeconomic theory of land speculation's effect on growth — distinct from, and considerably more mathematically developed than, the wiki's more empirical/historical 18-Year Land Cycle coverage.

Relation to the Georgist Case

Hirano is not a self-described Georgist and his earlier work (with Yanagawa and Inaba) is general asset-bubble theory with no land-specific or Georgist framing at all. What makes his collaboration with Stiglitz significant for this wiki is that it applies the same rigorous OLG bubble-and-growth machinery specifically to land, and — in the flagship 2025 paper — explicitly to Henry George's own argument, arriving at conclusions structurally sympathetic to the Georgist case (land speculation crowds out productive investment; land taxation can raise the growth rate) while also surfacing genuine complications a simple Georgist reading would miss (an isolated land tax can, in some of the program's models, widen rather than narrow price-fluctuation ranges away from the steady state). The wiki should present Hirano, like Stiglitz, as mainstream theoretical validation with real nuance, not an uncomplicated endorsement.

See Also

• Joseph Stiglitz — Hirano's principal co-author since 2022
• Hirano & Stiglitz: Henry George, Land Speculation, and Economic Growth — the flagship paper of their collaboration
• Hirano & Stiglitz: Land Speculation and Wobbly Dynamics
• 18-Year Land Cycle
• LVT dampens land speculation

Sources

1. Royal Holloway, University of London, faculty profile — used for Hirano's current title (Associate Professor of Economics) and departmental affiliation. royalholloway.ac.uk
2. LSE Centre for Macroeconomics — used for Hirano's Research Associate affiliation.
3. Canon Institute for Global Studies — used for Hirano's Research Fellow affiliation (searched 2026-08-18; the institute's own site returned a DNS error to this session's fetcher, so this affiliation is corroborated via secondary listings — CEPR and Google Scholar author profiles — rather than read directly).
4. researchmap.jp author profile for Tomohiro Hirano — researchmap.jp/tomohih — fetched and read 2026-08-18; used for the PhD in Economics from the University of Tokyo and his early-career position there. Page notes it was last substantively updated in 2012, predating his current Royal Holloway/LSE/Canon Institute positions, which are independently confirmed by sources 1–3.
5. Tomohiro Hirano & Noriyuki Yanagawa (2017), "Asset Bubbles, Endogenous Growth, and Financial Frictions," Review of Economic Studies 84(1): 406–443. DOI/IDEAS record — used for the title, venue, and year of this earlier, non-Stiglitz collaboration (title/venue-level confirmation; full text not read this session).
6. Tomohiro Hirano, Masaru Inaba & Noriyuki Yanagawa (2015), "Asset Bubbles and Bailout," Journal of Monetary Economics 76 — used for the title, venue, and year of this earlier paper (title/venue-level confirmation; full text not read this session).