Papers by Thomas J. Sargent

Published Review of Economic Dynamics Published Jan 2026

Time Averaging Meets Heckman, Lochner, and Taber and Ben-Porath

Sebastian Graves · Victoria Gregory · Lars Ljungqvist · Thomas J. Sargent

How does endogenizing retirement (career-length) choice change the labor-supply and human-capital implications of the canonical Heckman, Lochner, and Taber (1998a, HLT) life-cycle general-equilibrium …

Labor Markets Fiscal Policy Inequality Macro Dynamics

Published Classic Journal of Political Economy Published Apr 1975

"Rational" Expectations, the Optimal Monetary Instrument, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule

Thomas J. Sargent · Neil Wallace

This paper studies, within a simple "ad hoc" macroeconomic model not derived from individuals' and firms' optimizing behavior but built to resemble the macroeconometric models of the time, how the …

Expectations Monetary Policy Free Read ↗

Published Classic American Economic Review Published May 2007

ABCs (and Ds) of Understanding VARs

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde · Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez · Thomas J. Sargent · Mark W. Watson

This 2007 American Economic Review paper by Fernández-Villaverde, Rubio-Ramírez, Sargent, and Watson asks when the structural economic shocks in a DSGE model's state-space representation can be …

Structural Var Dsge Models

Published Classic Review of Economic Dynamics Published Apr 2005

Drifts and volatilities: monetary policies and outcomes in the post WWII US

Timothy Cogley · Thomas J. Sargent

This 2005 Review of Economic Dynamics paper by Timothy Cogley and Thomas J. Sargent extends their earlier Cogley-Sargent (2001) time-varying-parameter VAR (TVP-VAR) of postwar U.S.

Inflation Dynamics Monetary Policy Rules

Published Classic Review of Economic Dynamics Published Jul 2011

Israel 1983: A bout of unpleasant monetarist arithmetic

Thomas J. Sargent · Joseph Zeira

Israeli inflation jumped from 130% to 400% in October 1983 with no contemporaneous rise in the government deficit; Sargent and Zeira attribute the jump to the government's announced bailout of …

Fiscal Monetary Interactions Inflation Expectations Free Read ↗

Published Classic Journal of Political Economy Published Jun 1995

Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution

Thomas J. Sargent · François R. Velde

Interpreting the French Revolution through the lens of government-budget-constraint theory, this paper traces how a pre-1789 fiscal crisis, the assignat's evolution from tax-backed money into fiat …

Fiscal Monetary Interactions Inflation Dynamics Free Read ↗

Published Classic Quarterly Review (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis) Published Oct 1981

Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic

Thomas J. Sargent · Neil Wallace

Sargent and Wallace show that even in a fully monetarist economy, a monetary authority that tightens money today while an independent fiscal authority's deficits are taken as given must finance the …

Fiscal Monetary Interactions Free Read ↗

Published Classic Sveriges Riksbank Economic Review Published Nov 2000

The Conquest of American Inflation: A Summary

Thomas J. Sargent · Ulf Söderström

Summarizing Sargent's "The Conquest of American Inflation," this essay compares the popular rational-expectations "triumph of natural-rate theory" account of the rise and fall of U.S. inflation …

Expectations Learning Inflation Dynamics Free Read ↗

Published Classic Published May 1981

The Ends of Four Big Inflations

Thomas J. Sargent

This paper studies the abrupt endings of four post-World War I European hyperinflations -- in Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Germany -- arguing that each stopped suddenly and at a comparatively low …

Inflation Dynamics Inflation Expectations Fiscal Monetary Interactions Central Bank Independence Free Read ↗