Hideaki Hirata is the professor at the faculty of business administration, Hosei University, Japan. He is currently the visiting scholar at the Reischauer Institute, Harvard University.

His research and teaching focus primarily on macroeconomics and finance. His current research topics include (1) empirical studies on international business cycles and Japanese business cycles, (2) the role of expectations, and (3) corporate finance in Japan.Before joining the faculty of Hosei University, he was an economist at the Bank of Japan for 9 years. He conducted research on banking and finance, financial variables, and price indices. He was in charge of the BOJ's outright purchases of ABS related to SMEs activities, which has been known as the pioneering program of non-traditional monetary policy measures adopted by the Bank of Japan.

He took B. A. degree from Keio university in 1996, M. S. degree in 2001 from Brandeis University, and Ph. D. in 2003 also from Brandeis University. His dissertation ("Japanese Business Cycles in the World Economy") advisers are M. Ayhan Kose (Assistant to the Director in the IMF Research Department), Sunghyun Henry Kim (Associate Professor at Sungkyunkwan University and Suffolk University), Blake LeBaron (Abram L. and Thelma Sachar Professor of International Economics, Brandeis University), and Peter Petri (Carl J. Shapiro Professor of International Finance, Brandeis University).