A Nobel Prize for Empirical Macroeconomics: Assessing the Contributions of Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims

This paper provides an assessment of the contributions of the 2011 Nobel Prize winners, Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims. They received the prize ‘for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy’. The paper illustrates that Sargent entertained different interpretations of rational expectations during distinct phases of his research. And it shows that Sims shifted the focus from theoretical identification restrictions to identifying the main characteristics of the time series data, a shift of focus from theory to time series.