Lars Peter Hansen Quotes

Lars Peter Hansen — American Economist born on October 26, 1952,

Lars Peter Hansen is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Best known for his work on the Generalized Method of Moments, he is also a distinguished macroeconomist, focusing on the linkages between the financial and real sectors of the economy. He received the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Economy, Finance and Management and in 2013, it was announced that he would be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, jointly with Robert J. Shiller and Eugene Fama... (wikipedia)

I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as, roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything.

Early on, in discussions of financial oversight, people would say, 'Well, this is a very complicated problem, therefore it requires a complicated solution.' And at that step, I would say, 'Well, wait a minute. Just because it's a complicated problem doesn't mean the best course of action immediately is one that's complicated.'

If you simply announce that things are irrational, then that alone doesn't get you very far. You have to replace rational agents with some concrete notion of what it means to be irrational.

There is a big divergence between views on a variety of policy issues from fiscal stimulus to financial regulation. It's my hope and my ambition for the economics profession that as we advance our knowledge, that those discussions will narrow in their focus, and that it will help to have more prudent policy-making down the road.

I work on the boundary between economics and statistics in this field called econometrics. Part of my interest is understanding how you use statistics in productive ways to analyze dynamic economic models.

Lars Peter Hansen Quotes

Login with