Bøker av Lars Peter Hansen

The standard theory of decision making under uncertainty advises the decision maker to form a statistical model linking outcomes to decisions and then to choose the optimal distribution of outcomes. This assumes that the decision maker trusts the model completely. But what should a decision maker do if the model cannot be trusted? Lars Hansen and Thomas Sargent, two leading macroeconomists, push the field forward as they set about answering this question. They adapt robust control techniques and apply them to economics. By using this theory to let decision makers acknowledge misspecification in economic modeling, the authors develop applications to a variety of problems in dynamic macroeconomics. Technical, rigorous, and self-contained, this book will be useful for macroeconomists who seek to improve the robustness of decision-making processes.

A common set of mathematical tools underlies dynamic optimization, dynamic estimation, and filtering. In Recursive Models of Dynamic Linear Economies, Lars Peter Hansen and Thomas Sargent use these tools to create a class of econometrically tractable models of prices and quantities. They present examples from microeconomics, macroeconomics, and asset pricing. The models are cast in terms of a representative consumer. While Hansen and Sargent demonstrate the analytical benefits acquired when an analysis with a representative consumer is possible, they also characterize the restrictiveness of assumptions under which a representative household justifies a purely aggregative analysis.Hansen and Sargent unite economic theory with a workable econometrics while going beyond and beneath demand and supply curves for dynamic economies. They construct and apply competitive equilibria for a class of linear-quadratic-Gaussian dynamic economies with complete markets. Their book, based on the 2012 Gorman lectures, stresses heterogeneity, aggregation, and how a common structure unites what superficially appear to be diverse applications. An appendix describes MATLAB programs that apply to the book's calculations.