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Lars Peter Hansen
USINFO | 2013-11-20 15:02
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics 2013 Laureate
Lars Peter Hansen (2007)
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| Born |
October 26, 1952 (age 61) Champaign, Illinois |
| Nationality | United States |
| Institution |
University of Chicago Carnegie Mellon University |
| Field | Macroeconomics |
| Alma mater |
University of Minnesota (Ph.D.) Utah State University (B.Sc.) |
| Influences | Thomas J. Sargent, Christopher A. Sims |
| Contributions | Generalized method of moments, Robust control applied to macroeconomics and asset pricing |
| Awards |
BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award 2010 CME Group-MSRI Prize 2008 Nemmers Prize, 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics(2013) |
Biography
After graduating from Utah State University (B.S. Mathematics, Political Science, 1974) and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D. Economics, 1978) he served as assistant and associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University before moving to the University of Chicago in 1981. He is currently the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics and the College at the University of Chicago.
He has two brothers, Ted Howard Hansen, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis and Roger Hansen, an engineer in water resource management. His father, Roger Gaurth Hansen, served as provost of Utah State University and was a professor of biochemistry.
Contributions
Hansen is best known as the developer of the econometric technique GMM or Generalized method of moments and has written and co-authored papers applying GMM to analyze economic models in numerous fields including labor economics, international finance, finance and macroeconomics. This method has been widely adopted where fully specifying and solving a model of a complex economic environment makes maximum likelihood estimation unwieldy or inapplicable. Hansen showed how to exploit moment conditions (e.g. relations where conditional expectations are known to be zero at true parameter values) to construct reasonable, reliable estimators (i.e. having desirable statistical properties such as consistency, asymptotic normality, and efficiency within the class of all asymptotic normal estimators) with less stringent maintained model assumptions than needed for maximum likelihood estimation.
Together with Ravi Jagannathan he showed that the ratio of any stochastic discount factor's standard deviation to its mean is at least as great as any asset's Sharpe ratio; this result is known as the Hansen–Jagannathan bound.
His current research interests include work on the long-run risk-return tradeoff with José Scheinkman and the examination of the term structure of pricing risk shocks in dynamic macroeconomic models through the use of "dynamic valuation decomposition." In other work, he is incorporating beliefs, doubts, and learning into representative agent models, and developing implications for empirical macroeconomics and finance. Thomas J. Sargent and Hansen have co-written Robustness which explores implications of robust control theory for macroeconomic modeling when the decision-maker is skeptical of any single statistical model's ability to capture how decisions are linked to outcomes. More recently, Hansen has begun to turn his and Sargent's ideas about the difference between risk and uncertainty (also known as Knightian uncertainty) towards the measurement of "systemic risk" and its role in the 2008 financial crisis.
Associations
Hansen is currently the Research Director of the Becker Friedman Institute, where he also co-directs (along with economist Andrew Lo) the Macro Financial Modeling Group, a network of macroeconomists working to develop improved models of the linkages between the financial and real sectors of the economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and served as President of the Econometrics Society in 2007. He was a founding Director of the Milton Friedman Institute (now the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics). He is the co-editor of "Advances in Economics and Econometrics," and the "Handbook of Financial Econometrics." He is one of the founders of The Society for Financial Econometrics (SoFiE) .
He is the co-winner of the Frisch Medal with Kenneth Singleton in 1984, was awarded the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics in 2006, and the CME Group-MSRI Prize In Innovative Quantitative Applications in 2008. In 2011, he was awarded the "BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award" in Economics, Finance and Management “for making fundamental contributions to our understanding of how economic actors cope with risky and changing environments. "
