Lars Peter Hansen

Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Economics, University of Chicago

In the 1980s Professor Lars Peter Hansen became established as the leading contributor to the development and application of rigorous estimation and testing methods for financial data. His 1982 paper on “Generalized Methods of Moments” fundamentally altered the way that empirical research is done in finance and macroeconomics. This new methodology led him, with Ken Singleton, to make one of the pioneering contributions to what became known as the “equity premium puzzle.” Hansen continues to be a prolific researcher. He is part of a team investigating how long-run risk tradeoffs are encoded in asset prices. Hansen has also collaborated with others to develop models in which investors guard their investments against possible model misspecification, which they have shown are reflected in security market values and contribute to price dynamics.

Professor Hansen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Econometric Society. Hansen is a former John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and Sloan Foundation Fellow. Since 1981 Hansen has served on the faculty of the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics, where he was the former director of graduate studies and chairman. He is the recipient of the 2006 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics from Northwestern University, a Faculty Award for Excellence in graduate teaching from the University of Chicago and co-winner of the Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society. In 2008, he was the recipient of the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications. Currently, he is editing the Handbook of Financial Econometrics with Yacine Ait-Sahalia.