Lars Peter Hansen

Biosketch

Lars Peter Hansen is a leading expert in economic dynamics who works at the forefront of economic thinking and modeling, drawing approaches from macroeconomics, finance, and statistics. He is a recipient of the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.Hansen joined the faculty of the University of Chicago?s Department of Economics in 1981 and has served as department chairman and director of graduate studies. He is now David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Statistics, and the College. He is the Director of the Becker Friedman Institute and chairs the Academic Research Council for that institute.

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.