Thomas J. Sargent

Open full sized image

Thomas J. Sargent.

Denise Applewhite/Princeton University, Office of Communications

Thomas J. Sargent is an American economist who, with Christopher A. Sims, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Economics. He and Sims were honoured for their independent but complementary research on how changes in macroeconomic indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP), inflation, investment, and unemployment causally interact with government economic policies (Sargent) and with economic “shocks,” or unexpected events (such as a sudden rise in the price of oil) with at least short-term economic consequences (Sims).

Sargent received a B.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1968. After serving in the U.S. Army as a systems analyst in the office of the assistant secretary of defense (1968–69), he taught at various universities in the United States until the early 1980s. He was a visiting scholar and later a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University from 1985. In the 1990s he held endowed chairs in economics at the University of Chicago and Stanford, and in 2002 he was appointed William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University.

(Read Milton Friedman’s Britannica entry on money.)

In the 1970s Sargent helped to develop rational expectations theory, which holds that certain economic outcomes (e.g., commodity prices) are partly determined by what people rationally expect those outcomes to be. Sargent’s Nobel Prize-winning work focused on isolating the causes and effects of changes in long-term economic policies, such as the adoption of new inflation targets or the imposition of permanent constraints on government budgets. The main challenge faced by analysts of such changes was that economic policy is influenced by the rational expectations of policy makers about future economic performance, while economic performance is influenced by the rational expectations of business leaders and investors about future economic policy. This interplay makes it difficult to determine whether (or to what extent) a given change in performance was caused by a change in policy or by a change in private-sector behaviour undertaken in expectation of a change in policy. Sargent developed a method, based on the analysis of historical data, for describing basic relations between macroeconomic indicators and expectations of economic policy that are not affected when economic policy shifts. These relations can be incorporated into mathematical models that account for historical data and reliably predict the effects of different policies in hypothetical circumstances. Sargent also applied his method in studies of historical episodes of hyperinflation and of the stagflation that characterized the U.S. and other economies in the 1970s.

Sargent was the author of numerous books and textbooks, including Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory (1987), the anthology Rational Expectations and Inflation, 2nd ed. (1993), and, with Lars Peter Hansen, Robustness (2008).