About

Alexis Akira Toda (pronounced Alexy Akira Toda) was born in Montréal, Canada to a Japanese father and a French-Canadian mother and moved to Japan at the age of four. He received a B.A. in medicine from University of Tokyo in 2004 and then an M.A. in economics in 2008 while practicing anesthesia. He moved to the United States in 2008 and obtained a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 2013. After teaching mathematics for economics, mathematical economics, and finance at UC San Diego for eleven years, he moved to Emory University in 2024. He is the author of more than 40 research articles published in economics, mathematics, physics, and medical journals on a wide variety of topics including general equilibrium, macro-finance, consumption and savings, income and wealth distributions, asset price bubbles, power laws, dynamic programming, econometrics, and numerical methods, among others. According to WikiTree, he is distant cousins with Celine Dion (singer), Justin Trudeau (Prime Minister of Canada), and Taylor Swift (singer).

My research

I am a mathematical economist with strong interests in applications, in particular macroeconomics and finance. The topics I have worked on include

• computational algorithm for solving macroeconomic models with realistic wealth distributions,
• simple formula and mathematical foundation for Pareto exponents that arise in random multiplicative processes in Markovian environments,
• optimal epidemic control when testing and government enforcement are imperfect,
• simple explanation for the saving behavior of the rich that does not rely on ad hoc utility functions,
• verification of the random multiplicative process to explain the spread of COVID-19,
• wealth inequality and stock market returns,
• determination of academic salaries,
• implication of financial development to international capital flows and welfare,
• impossibility of canonical macroeconomic models to explain wealth inequality,
• efficient discretization of non-linear, non-Gaussian Markov processes,

among others.

I have published papers in journals such as Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Theoretical Economics, Quantitative Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, American Mathematical Monthly, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, Operations Research Letters, and Physical Review E, among others. I am also a medical doctor (anesthesiologist) and an associate editor at Economic Theory and a co-editor at Journal of Mathematical Economics. Please see my research page for more details.

My values

I find it beautiful when regularity and complexity come together. Some corollaries of this statement are:

• I like mathematics,
• I like power law behavior,
• I like bubbles,
• My favorite composer is J. S. Bach,
• My favorite artist is M. C. Escher,
• I like short, simple papers that are to the point.

I also like programming, chess, and tennis, although I am not particularly good at those.

My Erdős number

My current Erdős number is 3, based on the following connections (you can use this tool to compute your Erdős number or the collaboration distance between anybody, though the tool is not perfect):