Christopher Albert Sims (born October 21, 1942) is an American
econometrician and
macroeconomist
Macroeconomics (from the Greek prefix ''makro-'' meaning "large" + ''economics'') is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole.
For example, using interest rates, taxes, a ...
. He is currently the John J.F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics at
Princeton University.
Together with
Thomas Sargent
Thomas John Sargent (born July 19, 1943) is an American economist and the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University. He specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time series econometr ...
, he won the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011. The award cited their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".
Biography
Sims was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Ruth Bodman (Leiserson), a Democratic politician and daughter of
William Morris Leiserson, and Albert Sims, a state department worker. His father was of English and Northern Irish descent, and his mother was of half Estonian Jewish and half English ancestry. His uncle was
Yale
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the worl ...
economist
Mark Leiserson. Sims earned his
A.B.
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...
in mathematics from
Harvard University ''magna cum laude'' in 1963 and his PhD in Economics from Harvard in 1968 under supervision of
Hendrik S. Houthakker
Hendrik Samuel Houthakker (December 31, 1924 – April 15, 2008) was a prominent American economist.
Life and career
Houthakker was born in Amsterdam to a Dutch-Jewish family. His father was a prominent art dealer. As a teenager he lived th ...
. During the 1963-64 academic year, he was a graduate student at the
University of California, Berkeley. He has held teaching positions at Harvard,
Yale University and, since 1999, Princeton. He spent the longest portion of his career at
Princeton University, teaching there from 1999 to the present day. Sims is a Fellow of the
Econometric Society (since 1974),
[Fellows of the Econometric Society as of February 2011](_blank)
, Econometric Society, Retrieved October 12, 2011. a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
(since 1988), a member of the
National Academy of Sciences (since 1989), and a member of the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
(since 2012). In 1995 he was president of the Econometric Society; in 2012, he was president of the
American Economic Association
The American Economic Association (AEA) is a learned society in the field of economics. It publishes several peer-reviewed journals acknowledged in business and academia. There are some 23,000 members.
History and Constitution
The AEA was est ...
.
Sims currently lives in New Jersey.
Contributions
Sims has published numerous important papers in his areas of research:
econometrics
Econometrics is the application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships.M. Hashem Pesaran (1987). "Econometrics," '' The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', v. 2, p. 8 p. 8� ...
and macroeconomic theory and policy. Among other things, he was one of the main promoters of the use of
vector autoregression
Vector autoregression (VAR) is a statistical model used to capture the relationship between multiple quantities as they change over time. VAR is a type of stochastic process model. VAR models generalize the single-variable (univariate) autoregres ...
in empirical macroeconomics. However, some of the maintained assumptions in such models have been incorrectly tested (Sims, 1980) using asymptotic distribution theory since it is infeasible to test over 200 restrictions on model parameters using only 60 observations on time series (Sargan, 1961). He has also advocated
Bayesian statistics
Bayesian statistics is a theory in the field of statistics based on the Bayesian interpretation of probability where probability expresses a ''degree of belief'' in an event. The degree of belief may be based on prior knowledge about the event, ...
, arguing for its power in formulating and evaluating economic policies.
Sims has been an outspoken opponent of the
rational expectations revolution in macroeconomics, arguing that it should be thought of as a "cautionary footnote" to econometric policy analysis, rather than "a deep objection to its foundations." He has been similarly skeptical of the value of
real business cycle
Real business-cycle theory (RBC theory) is a class of new classical macroeconomics models in which business-cycle fluctuations are accounted for by real (in contrast to nominal) shocks. Unlike other leading theories of the business cycle, RBC t ...
models.
He also helped develop the
fiscal theory of the price level
The fiscal theory of the price level is the idea that government fiscal policy, including debt and taxes present and future, is the primary determinant of the price level or inflation as opposed to monetary theory. FTPL requires confidence the gov ...
and the theory of
rational inattention.
Nobel Memorial Prize and lecture
On October 10, 2011, Christopher A. Sims together with
Thomas J. Sargent
Thomas John Sargent (born July 19, 1943) is an American economist and the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University. He specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time series econometric ...
was awarded the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The award cited their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy". His Nobel lecture, titled "Statistical Modeling of Monetary Policy and its Effects" was delivered on December 8, 2011.
[• http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2011/sims-lecture.html]
• Sims, Christopher A. (2011).
" Statistical Modeling of Monetary Policy and its Effects,"
Nobel lecture.
Translating his work into everyday language, Sims said it provided a technique to assess the direction of causality in central bank monetary policy. It confirmed the theories of monetarists like
Milton Friedman that shifts in the money supply affect inflation. However, it also showed that causality went both ways. Variables like interest rates and inflation also led to changes in the money supply.
Further reading
*
* Sargan, J.D. (1961). The maximum likelihood estimation of economic relationships with autoregressive residuals. Econometrica, 29, 414-426.
References
External links
*
Sims's biography on the official website of the Nobel PrizeSims's homepage on the Princeton University website*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sims, Christopher
1942 births
American Nobel laureates
American people of English descent
American people of Estonian-Jewish descent
American statisticians
Bayesian econometricians
Bayesian statisticians
Time series econometricians
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
Fellows of the Econometric Society
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Harvard University alumni
Living people
Nobel laureates in Economics
Presidents of the Econometric Society
Princeton University faculty
Harvard University faculty
University of Minnesota faculty
Yale University faculty
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
20th-century American writers
20th-century American economists
21st-century American economists
Presidents of the American Economic Association
National Bureau of Economic Research