Program Leader: Kyoji Fukao
(Professor, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University)

This Global Centers of Excellence (COE) program, the Research Unit for Statistical and Empirical Analysis in Social Sciences (G-COE Hi-Stat), aims at establishing a globally unique education and research base within the five-year span (2008-2012) of the program. Based on the construction of a social sciences data archive, the program, in collaboration with the Institute of Economic Research and the Department of Economics at Hitotsubashi University, focuses on the development of young academics through "on-the-job" training, empirical research using this archive, and the development of both statistical methods and economic theory directly related to the data.

Global COE programs are funded by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) to support Japanese universities' efforts to establish education and research centers that perform at the apex of global excellence. For FY2008, 14 programs were selected in the social sciences.