(2011) Thomas Sargent
American economist, specializing in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics and time series econometrics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2011 together with Christopher A. Sims \"for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy\". Born July 19, 1943. Sargent 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 Ph.D. from Harvard in 1968. He held teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania (1970–1971), University of Minnesota (1971–1987), University of Chicago (1991–1998), Stanford University (1998–2002) and Princeton University (2009), and is currently the Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University (since 2002). 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 F. Muth, then Robert Lucas, Jr., and Edward C. Prescott took it much farther. 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 F. Muth, then Robert Lucas, Jr., and Edward C. Prescott took it much farther. The key questions this program addresses are: 1) Why during the 1950s and 1960s was unemployment systematically lower in Europe than in the United States? 2) Why for two and a half decades after 1980 has unemployment been systematically higher in Europe than in the United States? In \"Two Questions about European Unemployment\", the answer is given that \"Europe has stronger employment protection despite also having had more generous government supplied unemployment compensation\". While this 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.
