For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory. Then, around 1990, my research turned to the study of economic systems and my development as an economist took on added dimensions. This biography will start with my student...

Nobel Prize Lecture, December 8, 2006

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 13, 1976

I was born July 31, 1912, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the fourth and last child and first son of Sarah Ethel (Landau) and Jeno Saul Friedman. My parents were born in Carpatho-Ruthenia (then a province of Austria-Hungary; later, part of inter-war Czechoslovakia, and, currently, of the Soviet Union). They...

Interview with the 2011 Laureates in Economic Sciences Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims, 6 December 2011. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editorial Director of Nobel Media.

My grandfathers were both immigrants to the US, one from Estonia, then part of the Russian empire, and the other from England. The Estonian, William Morris Leiserson, was Jewish. He fled Estonia in 1890 at the age of seven, through a forest in the dark of night, with his mother and two brothers....

Nobel Prize lecture, 8 December 2011

Nobel Prize lecture, 8 December 2011

How are GDP and inflation affected by a temporary increase in the interest rate or a tax cut? What happens if a central bank makes a permanent change in its inflation target or a government modifies its objective for budgetary balance? This year’s Laureates in economic sciences, Thomas J....

One of the main tasks for macroeconomists is to explain how macroeconomic aggregates -such as GDP, investment, unemployment, and inflation- behave over time. How are these variables affected by economic policy and by changes in the economic environment? A primary aspect in this analysis is the...