[2] Sheard has held chief economist positions at Lehman Brothers, Nomura Securities, Standard & Poor's Ratings Services, and S&P Global.

Prior to entering financial markets in 1995, he was an academic economist based in Australia, Japan and the United States, specializing in the Japanese economy and the economics of firm organization.

When Lehman failed in September 2008, after a stint at Barclays Capital, in November 2008 Sheard was appointed Global Chief Economist and Head of Economic Research at Nomura Securities, based in New York.

[22] 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.

[25] 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.

[46] His 1997 book in Japanese, Mein Banku Shihon Shugi no Kiki (The Crisis of Main Bank Capitalism),[47] published by Toyo Keizai Shinposha, was awarded the 1998 Suntory Gakugei Prize in the Economics-Politics Section.