Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims Were Awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for their Empirical Research on Macroeconomics

Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011 for developing methods that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said could be used to identify causal relationships between policymakers and private sector decision-makers.

“The expectations of the private sector regarding future economic activity and policy influence decisions about wages, saving and investments. Concurrently, economic-policy decisions are influenced by expectations about developments in the private sector,” the Academy said. “The Laureates’ methods can be applied to identify these causal relationships and explain the role of expectations.”

At the time of the award, Sargent was the William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a research associate in the NBER's Economic Fluctuations and Growth (EFG) Program. Sims was the Harold H. Helm Professor of Economics and Banking at Princeton University and a research associate in the NBER’s Monetary Economics and EFG programs.

More information on these Nobel laureates