For decades, the United States’ inflation rate hovered comfortably around the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. That changed in 2021, when inflation begin to rise at an alarming pace. For Americans under 40, it’s now the highest they’ve seen in their lives .
So how does this compare to the staggering inflation seen in the early 1980s and before? And what lessons can be learned from the past to help shape current policy?
Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent, the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University, will answer these questions and more as he takes the stage for his 2022 Rice Initiative for the Study of Economics (RISE) Lecture titled “Conquests of American Inflation: North and South.” The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held Oct. 28 from 6-7 p.m. in Rice's Hudspeth Auditorium.
"Professor Sargent is the leading scholar on inflation," said Flávio Cunha, professor and chair of Rice's Department of Economics. "No one has produced as much impactful research on this topic as he. Rice and the Houston community are lucky to have him share his expertise on this pressing issue."
Sargent’s lecture will take place during the RISE academic conference, which is focused on inflation. The conference will bring together leading researchers from across the globe to present new work that sheds light on the current crisis.
“As one of the leading experts on inflationary episodes in the U.S. and around the world, there is perhaps no one better equipped than Tom to discuss how lessons from the past can help us understand the current inflationary environment,” said Zachary Bethune , an associate professor of economics who studies inflation and an organizer of the conference. “Tom’s keynote will highlight the weekend where we bring together leading academics to present frontier research on inflation, a topic in the front of the minds of so many right now.”
Sargent was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics (shared with Christopher Sims of Princeton) for his research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy. Widely published in the field of macroeconomics, he has pioneered research on the role of expectations in macroeconomics, the interaction of monetary and fiscal policy, the causes and consequences of inflation and why some countries experience high unemployment.
A graduate of Harvard University (Ph.D., 1968) and the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 1964), he previously served as a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago and Stanford University. He also currently serves as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. More information on Sargent is available at tomsargent.com.
To register for the event, visit https://events.rice.edu/#!view/event/date/20221028/event_id/316209.
To watch the event virtually, visit https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0WWE-lX8TaO_LgZ_gvPYcw.
More information on the Rice Initiative for the Study of Economics is available online at https://economics.rice.edu/rise .