Inflation: The 34th NBER-TCER-CEPR TRIO Conference
Between January 2015 and January 2020, the price level rose 10 percent in the US, 6 percent in the euro area, and 3 percent in Japan.1 In the last five years (from August 2021 to August 2026), the price level rose 22 percent in the US, 24 percent in the euro area, and 15 percent in Japan. Inflation is back and so are questions about its causes and consequences. Inflation is, of course, of interest to macroeconomists, but not only to them; it affects and is affected by labor markets, energy markets, housing markets, and international trade.
The 34th TRIO conference, jointly sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Tokyo Center for Economic Research (TCER), and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), will focus on the causes and consequences of inflation. The conference is organized by Joshua Hausman (NBER), Kenichi Ueda and Refet Gürkaynak (CEPR), and Shin-ichi Fukuda (TCER). It will include roughly 6-8 paper presentations and will be held at the University of Tokyo on Saturday-Sunday, March 6-7, 2027. The conference will conclude by 12:30pm on Sunday, March 7, thus allowing participants to fly back to North America that day.
The organizers welcome submissions on all topics related to inflation, both within one country and across multiple countries. Theoretical and empirical work from all subfields of economics will be considered, and the research need not be related to Japan.
Papers by researchers with and without NBER affiliations and from researchers at all career stages are welcome.
Papers presented at the conference may be submitted to a special issue of the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies (JJIE), and authors are encouraged to consider this outlet for their work. If a paper is published in the JJIE, the author(s) will receive a total honorarium of JPY200,000, which can be divided among multiple authors. Papers submitted to the JJIE will undergo the normal journal reviewing process.
The deadline for submitting papers is 11:59pm Eastern time on November 20, 2026. Papers may be submitted via the following link:
Submit paper
NOTE: Only authors based in North America should submit via this link. If the paper is co-authored, the submitting author will be expected to present at the conference.
Preference will be given to completed papers and to detailed drafts. Selected authors will be notified by December 11, 2026. The Center for Advanced Research in Finance (CARF) at the University of Tokyo will cover travel and hotel expenses for one North America-based author of each paper to attend the conference. Other authors are welcome to attend at their own expense. Conference attendance is by invitation only. Please direct questions to Joshua Hausman (hausmanj@umich.edu).
- U.S. prices are the non-seasonally adjusted, all items CPI from FRED series CPIAUCNS. European prices are the non-seasonally adjusted harmonized CPI for the euro area from FRED series CP0000EZ19M086NEST. Japanese prices are the all items CPI downloaded from Statistics of Japan (table number 1-1).