Thomas J. Sargent

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Thomas J. Sargent
Nobel Prize 2011-Press Conference KVA-DSC 7770.jpg
Sargent in 2011
Born (1943-07-19) July 19, 1943 (age 81)
Pasadena, California, U.S.
Education University of California, Berkeley (BA)
Harvard University (PhD)
Academic career
Field Macroeconomics, monetary economics
Institution Hoover Institution
Carnegie-Mellon University
University of Pennsylvania
University of Minnesota
University of Chicago
Stanford University
New York University
Peking University HSBC Business School
Doctoral
advisor		 John R. Meyer
Doctoral
students		 Robert Litterman
Monika Piazzesi
Mariacristina De Nardi
Ellen McGrattan
Lars Peter Hansen
Albert Marcet
Noah Williams
Laura Veldkamp
Richard Clarida
Danny Quah
Sagiri Kitao
Martin Eichenbaum
Lawrence J. Christiano
Greg Kaplan
Influences John F. Muth
Robert E. Lucas, Jr.
Christopher A. Sims
Neil Wallace
Awards Nemmers Prize in Economics (1996)
NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing (2011)
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2011)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc
Academic background
Thesis The structure of interest rates  (1968)
Thomas J. Sargent
AllegianceFlag of the United States.svg  United States
Service / branchFlag of the United States Army.svg  United States Army
Years of service1968-1969
Rank US-O3 insignia.svg Captain [1]

Thomas John Sargent (born July 19, 1943) is an American economist and the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University. [2] He specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time series econometrics. As of 2024, he ranks as the 38th most cited economist in the world. [3] He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2011 together with Christopher A. Sims for their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy". [4]

Contents

Education

Sargent graduated from Monrovia High School. [5] He earned his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, being the University Medalist as Most Distinguished Scholar in Class of 1964, and his PhD from Harvard in 1968, under supervision of John R. Meyer. [6] Sargent's classmates at Harvard included Christopher A. Sims. After serving in the U.S. Army as a first lieutenant and captain, he moved on to teaching. [7] He held teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania (1970–71), University of Minnesota (1971–87), University of Chicago (1991–98), Stanford University (1998–2002) and Princeton University (2009), and is currently a professor of economics at New York University (since 2002). He previously held the position of President of the American Economic Association and the Econometric Society where he has been a fellow since 1976. [7] In 1983, Sargent was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and also the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [8] He has been a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University since the year 1987.

Professional contributions

Sargent is one of the leaders of the "rational expectations revolution," which argues that the people being modeled by economists can predict the future, or the probability of future outcomes, at least as well as the economist can with his model. Rational expectations was introduced into economics by John Muth, [9] then Robert Lucas, Jr., and Edward C. Prescott took it much farther. In work written in close collaboration with Lucas and Neil Wallace, Thomas J. Sargent contributed fundamentally to the evolution of new classical macroeconomics. [10]

Sargent's main contributions to rational expectations were these:

In 1975 he and Wallace proposed the policy-ineffectiveness proposition, which challenged a basic assumption of Keynesian economics.

Sargent went on to refine or extend rational expectations reasoning by further:

Sargent has also been a pioneer in introducing recursive economics to academic study, especially for macroeconomic issues such as unemployment, fiscal and monetary policy, and growth. His series of textbooks, co-authored with Lars Ljungqvist, are seminal in the contemporary graduate economics curriculum.

Sargent has pursued a research program with Ljungqvist [26] designed to understand determinants of differences in unemployment outcomes in Europe and the United States during the last 30 years. The two key questions the program addresses are why, in the 1950s and 1960s, unemployment was systematically lower in Europe than in the United States and why, for two and a half decades after 1980, unemployment has been systematically higher in Europe than in the United States. In "Two Questions about European Unemployment," the answer is that "Europe has stronger employment protection despite also having had more generous government supplied unemployment compensation"." While the institutional differences remained the same over this time period, the microeconomic environment for workers changed, with a higher risk of human capital depreciation in the 1980s. [27]

In 1997, he won the Nemmers Prize in Economics [28]

In 2011, he was awarded the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing from the National Academy of Sciences [29] and, in September, he became the recipient of the 2011 CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications. [30]

Sargent is known as a devoted teacher. Among his PhD advisees are men and women at the forefront of macroeconomic research [ who? ]. Sargent's reading group at Stanford and NYU is a famous institution among graduate students in economics. [31] [32]

In 2016, Sargent helped found the non-profit QuantEcon project, which is dedicated to the development and documentation of modern open source computational tools for economics, econometrics, and decision making. [33]

Currently he is director of the Sargent Institute of Quantitative Economics and Finance (SIQEF) at Peking University HSBC Business School in Shenzhen. [34]

Nobel Prize

Interview with Thomas J. Sargent after his Nobel lecture

On October 10, 2011, Sargent, with Christopher A. Sims, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The award cited their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy". [35] His Nobel lecture, "United States Then, Europe Now," was delivered on December 11, 2011. [36] [37]

He is featured playing himself in a television commercial for Ally Financial in which he is asked if he can predict CD rates two years from now, to which he simply answers, "No." [38]

Sargent is notable for making short speeches. For example, in 2007 his Berkeley graduation speech consumed 335 words. [39] [40]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

In economics, adaptive expectations is a hypothesized process by which people form their expectations about what will happen in the future based on what has happened in the past. For example, if people want to create an expectation of the inflation rate in the future, they can refer to past inflation rates to infer some consistencies and could derive a more accurate expectation the more years they consider.

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Rational expectations is an economic theory that seeks to infer the macroeconomic consequences of individuals' decisions based on all available knowledge. It assumes that individuals' actions are based on the best available economic theory and information.

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Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. was an American economist at the University of Chicago. Widely regarded as the central figure in the development of the new classical approach to macroeconomics, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1995 "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy". N. Gregory Mankiw characterized him as "the most influential macroeconomist of the last quarter of the 20th century". In 2020, he ranked as the 10th most cited economist in the world.

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Monetary economics is the branch of economics that studies the different theories of money: it provides a framework for analyzing money and considers its functions, and it considers how money can gain acceptance purely because of its convenience as a public good. The discipline has historically prefigured, and remains integrally linked to, macroeconomics. This branch also examines the effects of monetary systems, including regulation of money and associated financial institutions and international aspects.

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Robert Joseph Barro is an American macroeconomist and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Barro is considered one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, along with Robert Lucas Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the influential Quarterly Journal of Economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John B. Taylor</span> American economist (born 1946).

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The policy-ineffectiveness proposition (PIP) is a new classical theory proposed in 1975 by Thomas J. Sargent and Neil Wallace based upon the theory of rational expectations, which posits that monetary policy cannot systematically manage the levels of output and employment in the economy.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher A. Sims</span> American econometrician and macroeconomist

Christopher Albert Sims is an American econometrician and macroeconomist. He is currently the John J.F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Together with Thomas Sargent, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011. The award cited their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".

Phillip David Cagan was an American scholar and author. He was Professor of Economics Emeritus at Columbia University.

The Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics is an academic prize awarded biennially by Northwestern University. It was initially endowed along with a companion prize, the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics. Both are part a $14 million donation from the Nemmers brothers, who envisioned creating an award that would be as prestigious as the Nobel prize. Nine out of the past 15 Nemmers economics prize winners have gone on to win a Nobel Prize : Peter Diamond, Thomas J. Sargent, Robert Aumann, Daniel McFadden, Edward C. Prescott, Lars Peter Hansen, Jean Tirole, Paul R. Milgrom and, most recently, Claudia Goldin. Those who already have won a Nobel Prize are ineligible to receive a Nemmers prize. The Nemmers prizes are given in recognition of major contributions to new knowledge or the development of significant new modes of analysis in the respective disciplines. As of 2023, the prize carries a $300,000 stipend, among the largest monetary awards in the United States for outstanding achievements in economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of macroeconomic thought</span>

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The Lucas aggregate supply function or Lucas "surprise" supply function, based on the Lucas imperfect information model, is a representation of aggregate supply based on the work of new classical economist Robert Lucas. The model states that economic output is a function of money or price "surprise". The model accounts for the empirically based trade off between output and prices represented by the Phillips curve, but the function breaks from the Phillips curve since only unanticipated price level changes lead to changes in output. The model accounts for empirically observed short-run correlations between output and prices, but maintains the neutrality of money in the long-run. The policy ineffectiveness proposition extends the model by arguing that, since people with rational expectations cannot be systematically surprised by monetary policy, monetary policy cannot be used to systematically influence the economy.

Lars Ljungqvist is a Swedish economist probably best known as the author of Recursive Macroeconomic Theory, a standard graduate level textbook of modern macroeconomics, with Thomas J. Sargent.

References

  1. ↑ "NYU Bio: Thomas J. Sargent". NYU Stern . Retrieved 11 November 2022.
  2. ↑ "NYU Bio: Thomas J. Sargent". NYU Stern . Retrieved 11 November 2022.
  3. ↑ "Economist Rankings at IDEAS". Ideas.repec.org. Retrieved 2011-10-10.
  4. ↑ "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2011" (Press release). Nobel Prize. 10 October 2011.
  5. ↑ "Monrovia High grad wins Nobel Prize in economics". Pasadena Star-News. 10 October 2011. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015.
  6. ↑ Sent, Esther-Mirjam (2006). The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations: An Assessment of Thomas Sargent's Achievements. Cambridge University Press. p. 35. ISBN   9780521027717.
  7. 1 2 URL:https://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/thomas-sargent
  8. ↑ "Book of Members, 1780–2011: Chapter S" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 13 October 2011.
  9. ↑ Muth, J. F. (1961). "Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements". Econometrica. 29 (3): 315–35. doi:10.2307/1909635. JSTOR   1909635.
  10. ↑ Galbács, Peter (2015). The Theory of New Classical Macroeconomics. A Positive Critique. Contributions to Economics. Heidelberg/New York/Dordrecht/London: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-17578-2. ISBN   978-3-319-17578-2.
  11. ↑ Sargent, Thomas J., and Neil Wallace, 1975. "'Rational' Expectations, the Optimal Monetary Instrument, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule," Journal of Political Economy, 83(2), pp. pp. 241–54.
  12. ↑ Sargent, T. J. (1981). "Interpreting Economic Time Series" (PDF). The Journal of Political Economy. 89 (2): 213–48. doi:10.1086/260963. JSTOR   1833309. S2CID   152875567.
  13. ↑ Sargent, Thomas J.; Wallace, Neil (1976). "Rational Expectations and the Theory of Economic Policy" (PDF). Journal of Monetary Economics. 2 (2): 169–83. doi:10.1016/0304-3932(76)90032-5.[ permanent dead link ]
  14. ↑ Sargent, T. J. (1979). "A note on maximum likelihood estimation of the rational expectations model of the term structure" (PDF). Journal of Monetary Economics. 5: 133–35. doi:10.1016/0304-3932(79)90029-1.
  15. ↑ Sargent, T. J. (1977). "The Demand for Money during Hyperinflations under Rational Expectations: I". International Economic Review. 18 (1): 59–82. doi:10.2307/2525769. JSTOR   2525769.
  16. ↑ Sargent, T. J.; Fand, D.; Goldfeld, S. (1973). "Rational Expectations, the Real Rate of Interest, and the Natural Rate of Unemployment". Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. 1973 (2): 429–80. doi:10.2307/2534097. JSTOR   2534097.
  17. ↑ Sargent, Thomas J. & Neil Wallace (1981). "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic". Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review. 5 (3): 1–17.
  18. ↑ Sargent, Thomas J. (1983). "The Ends of Four Big Inflations" in: Inflation: Causes and Effects, ed. by Robert E. Hall, University of Chicago Press, for the NBER, 1983, p. 41–97.
  19. ↑ Sargent, T. J.; Velde, F. O. R. (1995). "Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution". The Journal of Political Economy. 103 (3): 474–518. doi:10.1086/261992. S2CID   153904650.
  20. ↑ Sargent, Thomas J. (1992). Rational Expectations and Inflation. Harper and Row. ISBN   978-0-06-500280-5.
  21. ↑ Sargent, Thomas J.; Velde, F.R. (2003). The Big Problem of Small Change. Princeton University Press. ISBN   978-0-691-11635-8.
  22. ↑ Sargent, Thomas J. (1993). Bounded Rationality in Macroeconomics. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-828869-5. Description and chapter-preview 1st-page links.
  23. ↑ Marcet, A. (1989). "Convergence of least squares learning mechanisms in self-referential linear stochastic models*1". Journal of Economic Theory. 48 (2): 337–68. doi:10.1016/0022-0531(89)90032-X.
  24. 1 2 Sargent, Thomas J. (1999). The Conquest of American Inflation. Princeton University Press. ISBN   978-0-691-00414-3.
  25. ↑ Hansen, Lars Peter; Sargent, Thomas J. (2008). Robustness. Princeton University Press. ISBN   978-0-691-11442-2.
  26. ↑ "Lars Ljungqvist". Archived from the original on 2011-12-29.
  27. ↑ Ljungqvist, L.; Sargent, T. J. (2008). "Two Questions about European Unemployment". Econometrica. 76: 1. doi:10.1111/j.0012-9682.2008.00816.x.
  28. ↑ "NYU Stern - Thomas Sargent - William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business".
  29. ↑ "NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 18 March 2011. Retrieved 27 February 2011.
  30. ↑ "2011 CME Group-MSRI Prize".
  31. ↑ "Conference in Honor of Tom Sargent's Nobel Prize in Economics and Reading Group Reunion".
  32. ↑ "Videos of Reading Group Conference". YouTube .
  33. ↑ "QuantEcon". QuantEcon. Retrieved 4 August 2017.
  34. ↑ "Interview with Thomas Sargent on the PHD and Elite MA Programs at PHBS - News - Sargent Institute of Quantitative Economics of Finance".
  35. ↑ "The Prize in Economic Sciences 2011". Nobelprize.org. 2008-12-10. Retrieved 2011-10-10.
  36. ↑ Sargent, Thomas J. (2011)
  37. ↑ United States Then, Europe Now Archived 2013-01-15 at the Wayback Machine
  38. ↑ AdWeek: Economist Thomas J. Sargent appears in ad for Ally Bank
  39. ↑ Tom Sargent Summarizes Economics
  40. ↑ Text of Berkeley Speech Archived 2014-08-11 at the Wayback Machine
Academic offices
Preceded by President of the American Economic Association
2007– 2008		Succeeded by
Awards
Preceded by Laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics
2011
Served alongside: Christopher A. Sims 		Succeeded by
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