Monday, October 14, 2013

Fair and Balnced in Sweden

One guy gets a Nobel for  showing that asset markets are  efficient. Another gets  one for showing  that they are nothing of the sort! Go figure.

1 comment:

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

I have been suggesting for some time the possibility of this pairing, viewing it as a rerun of the old Myrdal-Hayek award, which had a lot of people scratching their heads. Note that prior to the 2008 crash, Fama regularly topped betting markets for getting the prize, and his fans neve went away and include Per Krusell, now apparently the dominant figure on the Nobel Prize committee.

But, of course after the crash Shiller soared to a high position on the lists (although, again, this year, the forecasters all got it wrong, hah hah hah!), so him getting it had enormous support. The compromise became obvious.

Throwing Hansen in shows the dominance of Krusell on the committee, who is very close to the whole Minnesota DSGE gang. Arguably Hansen deserves it for inventing GMM, which has many uses, and I am glad they did not cite its use by DSGEers to justify their inane calibration exercises, with them able to note the use of GMM in modling asset prices.

Let me note that I think Hansen deserved it, arguably even on his own, with most forecasting him throwing in other econometricians. But this particular combination is rather peculiar, and shows a tilt to orthodoxy given how many were forecasting another behavioralist, Thaler, to share it with Fama. When I made my occasional speculations on there being a combo, I called it as Fama-Shiller-Thaler, but Hansen is in there instead of Thaler.