Biography
Yohei joined the Department of Political Economy (DPE) in October 2023. He is a researcher working at the intersections of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. His research both empirically estimates and philosophically examines unjust distributive and relational inequality. His research in the 2025-2026 academic year is partially funded by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.
During the 2025-2026 academic year, he will be visiting the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (September-November) and the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo (December-September).
Yohei is currently working on the following three projects to distil meaningful policy-implications:
- His first project explores the distributive demands of relational equality and proposes a novel approach to the classical responsibility-cut debate, which he calls the “self-respect approach”.
- His second project estimates the extent of inequality of opportunity in educational attainment, including the part that manifests itself through students’ effort, using a machine-learning algorithm called model-based recursive partitioning.
- His third project proposes a novel measure of relational inequality, which quantifies, with the use of machine-learning algorithms, the extent to which the most disadvantaged social group overlaps across domains of well-being (e.g., income, physical and mental health, educational attainment, loneliness).
He is also an Adam Smith Fellow at the Mercatus Center, where he was a Carl Menger Fellow in the previous academic year.
Prior to joining DPE, Yohei worked in the field of healthcare, labour, welfare, and pension policies at the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare of Japan. He holds an MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Research) with a Titmuss Prize for the Best Dissertation from the London School of Economics and Political Science (2023), an MA in Economics from Tokyo Metropolitan University (2022), and a BA in Sociology (major concentration) and Political Theory (minor concentration) from McGill University (2016).
Research interests
- Theories of justice
- Inequality and poverty
- Machine-learning
- Measurement of effort
- Self-respect
- Social policy
PhD supervisors
Research
Politics, Philosophy and Economics Research Group
The PPE research group studies questions spanning the disciplines of politics, philosophy, and economics.
Political Theory Research Group
The political theory group covers many topics and approaches, and affirms the central importance of political economy to political theory.
Public Policy and Regulation Research Group
Public Policy and Regulation (PPR) is the home for theoretically and empirically grounded research which analyses policy and regulatory responses to important political, social and economic issues, and (individual-level) responses to these policies.
News
Doctoral student awarded grant from foundation
A PhD student has won grant funding from a leading foundation to support his research at King’s.
Research
Politics, Philosophy and Economics Research Group
The PPE research group studies questions spanning the disciplines of politics, philosophy, and economics.
Political Theory Research Group
The political theory group covers many topics and approaches, and affirms the central importance of political economy to political theory.
Public Policy and Regulation Research Group
Public Policy and Regulation (PPR) is the home for theoretically and empirically grounded research which analyses policy and regulatory responses to important political, social and economic issues, and (individual-level) responses to these policies.
News
Doctoral student awarded grant from foundation
A PhD student has won grant funding from a leading foundation to support his research at King’s.