Keizo Obuchi. He served as a member of the oversight board of the Japanese Government's Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry, 2001–2006. From 2003 to 2010, Sheard served as a non-executive director of ORIX Corporation, a large Japanese financial services firm. Contributions Sheard's academic work analyzed the economic rationale of distinct features of Japanese corporate organization, including the role of multi-tier subcontracting networks in the auto sector ; the role of main banks and interlocking shareholdings in creating an internalized market for corporate control that supported the "lifetime" employment system; the informational and risk-sharing role of general trading companies (Sogo shosha) as financial intermediaries; and assessing the arguments that Japanese firms avoided short-termism. In the "structural impediments" debate of the early 1990s, Sheard argued that many of the features criticized as "non-tariff barriers" or as being anti-competitive were better understood in terms of how firms and markets in Japan were efficiently organized. He pointed out that the common practice of characterizing keiretsu or affiliated enterprise groups in Japan as "horizontal groups" was confusing because to many foreign observers "horizontal" connoted within-same-market whereas most of the relationships in question were "vertical" (between stages of production) or between-market in nature. As a markets economist in Tokyo, Sheard was active in the policy debate, identifying two factors as contributing to Japan's falling into and remaining in deflation: the failure of the government to aggressively recapitalize the banks after it issued a blanket guarantee of deposits in June 1995 and the aggregate demand management policy mix, under macro deleveraging, of "timid" monetary policy and stop-start fiscal policy. After the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession, Sheard argued that sustained, aggressive monetary and fiscal policy expansion was needed to restore lost aggregate demand in the developed economies. He has argued that quantitative easing (QE), far from being inflationary "money printing," is best viewed as a "debt management operation of the consolidated government" whereby the central bank retires government debt securities and refinances them into central bank money, and that, contrary to common parlance, banks cannot "lend out" their excess reserves. Sheard argues that, QE being a mild form of monetary easing, the unwinding of QE, in principle, is an innocuous process. Invoking the metaphor of a "Monetary Garden of Eden", Sheard has argued that monetary and fiscal policies should be viewed as "two sides of the same sovereign coin" and much more closely coordinated