Masaru Sasaki received his Ph.D. in economics at Georgetown University in 1998, and subsequently joined the World Bank and then the Asian Development Bank. After serving at these international organizations, he was appointed as lecturer at Department of Economics, Kansai University. He then moved to Osaka University in 2004. He has since then served there.

Among his research interests are determinants of unemployment and mismatch in the labor market. He works not only on theoretical and empirical studies but also on laboratory experiments. He develops laboratory experiments to study the implications on various search models. In addition, he is interested in various topics covering from health economics to personnel economics.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in February 2012.