Thomas J. Sargent is a Professor of Economics at the New York University. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics, shared with Princeton University’s Christopher Sims (EcoMod’s Modeler of April 2011), for his empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.

Sargent has played a pivotal role in the development of the rational expectations approach in macreonomics and modeling. He explored the implications of rational expectations in empirical studies, by showing how rational expectations could be implemented in empirical analyses of macroeconomic events so that researchers could specify and test theories using formal statistical methods and by deriving implications for policymaking.

He also advanced and applied broader views on expectations formation, such as gradual learning. His methods for characterizing and structurally estimating macroeconomic models with microeconomic foundations broke new ground in allowing researchers to uncover the “deep” underlying model parameters and perform hypothesis testing. In a broader perspective, Sargent also raised important points of immediate policy relevance. One of the main contributions of Sargent is that good monetary policy requires good fiscal policy. Otherwise the fight against inflation will not be credible.

Thomas Sargent earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968. He was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, both in 1983. Professor Sargent is past president of the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association and the Society for Economic Dynamics.

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.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2011/

https://files.nyu.edu/ts43/public/