It's kind of a funny way to put it, but if you want to study a dynamic economic system, what you'd like to be able to do is focus on the linkages, say, between asset markets and the macro economy without having to model everything at the same time.
— Lars Peter Hansen
I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as, roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything.
There is a big divergence between views on a variety of policy issues from fiscal stimulus to financial regulation. It's my hope and my ambition for the economics profession that as we advance our knowledge, that those discussions will narrow in their focus, and that it will help to have more prudent policy-making down the road.
A lot of my colleagues have been people with broad interests in economics, not just narrowly focused interests.
If you simply announce that things are irrational, then that alone doesn't get you very far. You have to replace rational agents with some concrete notion of what it means to be irrational.
I work on the boundary between economics and statistics in this field called econometrics. Part of my interest is understanding how you use statistics in productive ways to analyze dynamic economic models.
Early on, in discussions of financial oversight, people would say, 'Well, this is a very complicated problem, therefore it requires a complicated solution.' And at that step, I would say, 'Well, wait a minute. Just because it's a complicated problem doesn't mean the best course of action immediately is one that's complicated.'
I think the understanding of the role of markets has really helped advance the values of entrepreneurship. It's helped shape public policy discussions in a whole variety of ways.
