Economics Nobel winners old friends, teach at Princeton

The two winners of the Nobel Prize in economics are both teaching at Princeton University this semester, but they’ve known each other for many years.

Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims were friends as graduate students at Harvard in the 1960s, and both later taught at the University of Minnesota.

This semester, they’re teaching a course together at Princeton.

Sargent is a professor at the Ivy League university while Sargent is a professor at New York University. They were awarded the Nobel on Monday for their work in researching the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and economic policy.

At a news conference at Princeton, Sims joked that he and Sargent don’t work together. Instead, he says they have “a series of ongoing arguments” about details of approaches to economics.