Hiroyuki Kohyama

Spring 2025 University of Tokyo Exchange Visitor

Hiroyuki Kohyama is a Professor of Law at the University of Tokyo, where he teaches tax law and public finance law. His research focuses on timing of taxation, discount rates for the governments, economic analysis of taxation, and intergenerational equity. He has recently conducted research in tax law through the lens of behavioral economics, behavioral science, and neuroscience. His monograph "Time, Risk and Income Taxation: Theory of Timing of Taxation" (Yuhikaku, 2019, in Japanese) won the Institute of Tax Research and Literature Award in 2020.

Kohyama obtained LL.B. from the University of Tokyo in 2003, LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 2005, and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2011. He began his academic career as a research associate (Johsyu) at the University of Tokyo in 2003. Before joining the the University of Tokyo faculty in 2020, Kohyama was an associate professor at Hitotsubashi University.

Kohyama is currently a member of the board of directors of Japanese Society for Tax Law. He serves on multiple expert committees for the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and National Tax Agency in Japan. In 2017, he participated as a special committee member of the Local Government Finance Council during the introduction of the Forest Environmental Tax, which was the first new tax introduced in decades in Japan. Since 2024, Kohyama has begun serving as an expert on the Expert Committee on Evidence-Based Policy Making (EBPM) in Taxation for the Government Tax Commission.