Thomas J. Sargent

Thomas J. Sargent, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is a recognized leader in the field of macroeconomics working on monetary and fiscal economics and applied time series analysis. He shared the Nobel Prize with Princeton’s Christopher Sims for “empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.”

His most recent papers document government policies and microeconomic risks that have contributed to persistently high European unemployment, propose ways to improve accounting for US federal interest payments on government debt, and interpret apparent instabilities in manifestations of the quantity theory of money.

Sargent holds a joint appointment at the New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences and its Stern School of Business. He previously held named chairs at the University of Chicago and Stanford University.  He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is past president of the Econometric Society and the American Economic Association, and won the Nemmers Prize in Economics in 1997.

Among his books are Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice with Robert E. Lucas Jr., University of Minnesota Press, 1981; The Big Problem of Small Change, with Francois Velde, Princeton University Press, 2002; Recursive Macroeconomic Theory, with Lars Ljungqvist, MIT Press, 2004; and Robustness, with Lars Peter Hansen, Princeton University Press, 2008.

He received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a PhD from Harvard University.

His visit is supported by a generous gift from Donald R. Wilson Jr., AB’88 that advances fiscal studies.

Faculty Page: Thomas J. Sargent

Personal Page: Thomas J. Sargent

Visited 10/26/15 – 10/30/15  ,  9/25/17 – 12/9/17