Minoru OSAWA

Welcome! I am an assistant professor at Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University. My research interests are in spatial economics, transportation science, and learning in games. You can call me Mino.

Research

Research summary

Publications

Spatial scale of agglomeration and dispersion: Number, spacing, and the spatial extent of cities.
Journal of Urban Economics, to appear. (2026) [paper] [Codes] [DP2017a] [DP2017b]
(with Takashi Akamatsu, Tomoya Mori, Yuki Takayama)
Equilibrium refinement for a model of non-monocentric internal structures of cities: A potential game approach.
Journal of Economic Theory (2020) [paper]
(with Takashi Akamatsu)
Harris and Wilson (1978) model revisited: The spatial period-doubling bifurcation in an urban retail model.
Journal of Regional Science (2016) [paper]
(with Takashi Akamatsu, Yuki Takayama)
First-best dynamic assignment of commuters with endogenous heterogeneities in a corridor network.
Transportation Research Part B: Methodological (2018) [paper]
(with Haoran Fu, Takashi Akamatsu)
Perturbed cusp catastrophe in a population game: Spatial economics with locational asymmetries.
Journal of Regional Science (2022) [paper]
(with Kiyohiro Ikeda, José Maria Gaspar, Yuki Takayama)
Breaking and sustaining bifurcations in S_N-invariant equidistant economy.
International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos (2021) [paper]
(with Hiroki Aizawa, Kiyohiro Ikeda, José Maria Gaspar)
Model-based analysis on social acceptability and feasibility of a focused protection strategy against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scientific Reports (2021) [paper]
(with Takashi Akamatsu, Takeshi Nagae, Koki Satsukawa, Takara Sakai, Daiziro Mizutani)
Time evolution of city distributions in Germany: Group-theoretic spectrum analysis.
Networks and Spatial Economics (2022) [paper]
(with Kiyohiro Ikeda, Yuki Takayama)
Spatio-temporal analysis of gasoline shortages in the Tohoku region after the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Journal of JSCE (2013) [paper]
(with Takashi Akamatsu, Takeshi Nagae, Hiromichi Yamaguchi)

Discussion Papers

Origin of power laws and their spatial fractal structure for city-size distributions (2024) [paper]
(with Tomoya Mori, Takashi Akamatsu, and Yuki Takayama)
[WIP] Understanding regional dynamics (2025) [paper] [slides]
Sampling logit equilibrium and endogenous payoff distortion (2026) [paper] [slides]
Most likely retail agglomeration patterns (2025) (with Takashi Akamatsu and Yosuke Kogure)
Innovation, spillovers and economic geography (2025) (with José Maria Gaspar)
Production externalities and dispersion process in a multi-region economy (2021) (with José Maria Gaspar)

Education and Experience

2020.04–Present: Assistant Professor (tenure-track)
Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University
2016.10–2020.03: Assistant Professor
School of Engineering, Tohoku University
2014.04–2016.09: Research Fellow (DC1)
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
2016.09: Ph.D. (Information Sciences)
Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University.
(Thesis supervisor: Takashi Akamatsu)
2012.03: Bachelor of Engineering
School of Engineering, Tohoku University
Mar. 2008: 長野県松本深志高等学校卒業

Other

Born in 1990. Love dogs. Love hiking. Do some drawing & painting.
Links to my other profiles: Twitter・ResearchGate・ORCID・Semantic Scholar
Researchers interested in presenting their work at our Urban Economics Workshop are welcome to contact me.