Agents as Empirical Macroeconomists: Thomas J. Sargent’s Contribution to Economics*
探讨托马斯·J·萨金特的贡献,他让模型中的代理人与计量经济学家处于同等地位,即假设代理人自身也是经验宏观经济学家,这一主题贯穿其大部分工作。
Abstract Thomas J. Sargent has fundamentally changed and, in the words of Art Rolnick, who interviewed him in 2010, “irrevocably transformed” the field of macroeconomics—whether as sole author, as co‐author with collaborators, as an author influenced by others, or as a teacher of the profession, influencing others. This paper is about his contribution to our field. The Nobel Memorial prize to Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims has been awarded for the “empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy” or, more broadly, for macroeconometrics. One often likes to distinguish between theorists, on the one hand, and empiricists and econometricians, on the other. Thomas J. Sargent holds a unique position in between. A key theme in a large part of his work has been to put the agents in his model on equal footing with the econometrician who is observing data from the model (i.e., to assume that agents are themselves empirical macroeconomists or macroeconometricians). In this paper, I use this theme to examine his work and his contributions to the study of economics.