Naohiko Baba (2019 Annual)

Chief Japan Economist
Goldman Sachs

Naohiko is chief Japan economist, responsible for economic and market analysis of the region. He joined Goldman Sachs as a managing director in 2011.

Prior to joining the firm, Naohiko worked at the Bank of Japan (BOJ), beginning his career there in 1992. From 2006 to 2007, Naohiko was the head of Money Markets and Fixed Income, where he led a team of economists and provided BOJ board members with inputs for monetary policy meetings. He left BOJ in late 2007 and returned in late 2009, serving as head of the Financial System Research Group. Naohiko was the main author of BOJ’s flagship “Financial System Report.”

From 2007 to 2009, Naohiko worked at the Bank of International Settlement (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. As a senior economist of global financial markets, he prepared inputs for high-level central bank conferences, as well as for BIS publications. Naohiko also investigated the US dollar shortage and its relation to the foreign exchange swap market during the global financial crisis, publishing articles stimulating worldwide discussions on the effectiveness of the central bank swap lines.

Throughout his career, Naohiko has published numerous articles in academic and policy-oriented journals in the fields of monetary policy, yield curve, asset pricing, credit risk, international finance, corporate finance, and hedge-fund behavior, among others.

Naohiko earned a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999.