NYU Economics Professor Thomas Sargent, the 2011 Nobel Laureate in Economics, will be awarded the prize on Saturday, December 10 in a ceremony in Stockholm. The event, which begins at 10:30 a.m. EST, may be viewed live at: http://www.nobelprize.org/.

NYU's Sargent to Receive Nobel Prize in Economics on Dec. 10
NYU Economics Professor Thomas Sargent, the 2011 Nobel Laureate in Economics, will be awarded the prize on Saturday, December 10 during a ceremony in Stockholm. The event, which begins at 10:30 a.m. EST, may be viewed live at: http://www.nobelprize.org/. In addition, Sargent will deliver his Nobel Lecture on Thursday, December 8, along with the Nobel Laureates in physics and chemistry. The series of Nobel Lectures begin at 3 a.m. EST and may also be viewed at http://www.nobelprize.org/.

New York University Economics Professor Thomas Sargent, the 2011 Nobel Laureate in Economics, will be awarded the prize on Saturday, December 10 during a ceremony in Stockholm. The event, which begins at 10:30 a.m. EST, may be viewed live at: http://www.nobelprize.org/.

In addition, Sargent will deliver his Nobel Lecture on Thursday, December 8, along with the Nobel Laureates in physics and chemistry. The series of Nobel Lectures begins at 3 a.m. EST and may also be viewed at http://www.nobelprize.org/.

Sargent shares the prize with Princeton University’s Christopher Sims. In awarding the prize, the Nobel Committee cited “their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.”

A professor at NYU’s Faculty of Arts and Science and its Stern School of Business, Sargent is widely acknowledged as a pioneer of the rational expectations school of macroeconomics. His work, together with that of 1995 Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas, provided the basis for the adoption of monetary and fiscal policies that replaced Keynesian ideology and prioritized the maintenance of low inflation and stable interest rates among governments and central banks. 

The Nobel Committee added that Sargent has “shown how structural macroeconometrics can be used to analyze permanent changes in economic policy. This method can be applied to study macroeconomic relationships when households and firms adjust their expectations concurrently with economic developments. Sargent has examined, for instance, the post-World War II era, when many countries initially tended to implement a high-inflation policy, but eventually introduced systematic changes in economic policy and reverted to a lower inflation rate.”

NYU has a total of 24 Nobel Prize winners, including both alumni and faculty. NYU School of Law alumnus Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. ElBaradei shared the prize with the organization he heads. NYU Stern School of Business Professor Robert Engle, who holds the Michael Armellino Professorship in Finance, captured the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH). Engle shared the prize with Clive W. J. Granger of the University of California at San Diego.

Sargent’s current work involves developing models to understand persistently high European unemployment rates; using new statistical methods to characterize rigorously the changing behavior of the Fed since WWII and the changing responsiveness of the U.S. economy to Fed actions; and applying techniques of robust control from engineering to optimal policy and the study of individual behavior.

 

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