[4][5] Nakamura graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in economics in 2001, completing a senior thesis titled "An Economy with Monetary Business Cycles" under the supervision of Michael Woodford.

[7] Nakamura's research focuses on empirical issues in macroeconomics, including price stickiness, the impact of fiscal shocks, and measurement errors in official statistics.

Her citation for the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association states that Nakamura has "greatly increased our understanding of price-setting by firms and the effects of monetary and fiscal policies", and cited her "creativity in suggesting new sources of data to address long-standing questions".

Nakamura demonstrates this in her work, “Five facts about prices”, by including microdata from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to prove macroeconomic ideas.

This confirms the prediction of Keynesian macroeconomic models that fiscal stimulus can have substantial effects on output, particularly at the zero lower bound.