person
Thomas Sargent
American economist (b. 1943). With Neil Wallace, co-architect of the policy-ineffectiveness proposition (1975, 1976). Principal applied-economic-history voice of the rational-expectations program. Nobel laureate 2011.
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Thomas J. Sargent’s long career at Minnesota, Stanford, and (since 2002) NYU produced the most sustained applied-historical engagement of the rational-expectations program. The 1975 and 1976 papers with Neil Wallace established the policy-ineffectiveness proposition: anticipated monetary policy has no real effects under rational expectations and continuous market clearing. Stopping Moderate Inflations (1982) and the work collected in Rational Expectations and Inflation (1986, multiple editions) apply the framework to monetary-regime case studies — the German hyperinflation, the French Poincaré stabilisation, the failed and successful disinflations of the early 1980s. The Conquest of American Inflation (1999) reads the postwar US inflation-and-disinflation experience through the rational-expectations apparatus.
Nobel Memorial Prize 2011 (jointly with Christopher Sims) for “empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.”