KURODA Akinobu‘s studies cover comparative studies of monetary history on East Asia, India, Africa, and Europe, as well as specific studies of China‘s monetary history. He has argued that we can determine the character of money according to the degrees along two axes. First, to what extent is the relationship between persons making transactions biased in either the direction of cohesiveness or of anonymity. Second, to what extent the conversion between the currency for local transactions and that for inter-regional settlements worked according to fixed or flexible conversion rates. For his study, the structure of the Chinese empire and the world economy, he won the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences in 1994 and doctoral degree of economics from Kyoto University in 1995. He was Mercator Gastprofessur (DFG) at University of Tubingen and visiting professor at Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre and Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. He is also the editor of the International Journal of Asian Studies (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=ASI).