Lars Peter Hansen

Biosketch

Lars Peter Hansen is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor and the Director of BFI’s Macro Finance Research (MFR) Program at the University of Chicago. He is the leading expert in economic dynamics who works at the forefront of economic thinking and modeling, drawing approaches from macroeconomics, finance, and statistics. Hansen has made fundamental advances in our understanding of how economic agents cope with changing and risky environments. He is the recipient of the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Research Interests

As an economist, I have studied the observable implications of models of dynamic economies, which has led to the development and implementation of methods for solving, estimating, and testing models of economic time series. I have applied these methods to characterize testable implications of models in which a large number of decision-makers interact through market mechanisms and to confront these implications with data from market economies. My initial work developed and applied statistical tools to models in which economic decision-makers predict the future without making systematic errors. Subsequently, I have studied how risk aversion in decision-making is reflected in the prices of risky assets, thus establishing empirical anomalies that challenge standard economic models. My recent research explores how individual concerns about the robustness in their beliefs about the future can help explain these anomalies.