AlQa'dah 12, 1432, Oct 10, 2011, SPA - US economists Thomas J Sargent and Christopher A Sims on Monday were awarded the 2011 Nobel economics prize for "their empirical research on cause and effect in the macro economy," said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The academy said they had developed methods to study the relationship between economic policy and macroeconomic variables such as gross domestic product, inflation, employment and investments. Their research centers on how "policy affects the economy, but the economy also affects policy," the academy said. Sargent, professor of economics and business at New York University, has focused on permanent changes in economic policy, such as inflation targets. Sims, professor of economics and banking at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has studied the effects of interest rates set by central banks, the academy was quoted as saying by the German Press Agency "DPA".
