Toru Kitagawa has won the 2023 Japanese Economic Association Nakahara Prize. This prize was instituted in 1995 and is awarded each year by the Japanese Economic Association to an outstanding Japanese economist under the age of 45. Previous winners of the prize have included some of the most prominent economists from Japan, including the macroeconomists Fumio Hayashi (1995), Kiminori Matsuyama (1996), and Nobuhiro Kiyotaki (1997), the game theorist Michihiro Kandori (2002), and the econometricians Yuichi Kitamura (2006) and Keisuke Hirano (2015).

Professor Kitagawa was commended for his important contributions to econometrics theory, in particular, for his work on evidence-based policy designs, specification tests for causal effect identification, and robustification of Bayesian inference.

Professor Kitagawa obtained Ph.D from Brown in 2009, and had professorship at University College London before joining Brown in 2021. Professor Kitagawa was promoted to a full professorship in 2022, and currently serves as the Director of Graduate Study.