Hansen, Lars Peter, 1952–, U.S. economist, b. Champaign, Ill., Ph.D. Univ. of Minnesota, 1978. After teaching at Carnegie-Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh (1978–81), he joined the faculty of the Univ. of Chicago, where he is now David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor. An econometrician, Hansen studied with Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims at Minnesota, and contributed to the development of rational expectations theory; like Sargent, he has since become critical of aspects of the theory. Hansen developed (1982) the generalized method of moments, a statistical technique designed to permit the study of part of an economic model without having to specify a complete model in its full complexity; it has been utilized in other social sciences in addition to economics. For his work developing the technique and using to test the Consumption Capital Asset Pricing Model, he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller in 2013. Hansen also has studied the relationship between the financial markets and the broader economy, seeking to develop better models of their interactions.
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