Christopher A. Sims

Christopher Albert Sims was born on October 21, 1942, in Washington, D.C. His father, Albert Sims, was the son of an English immigrant textile manager and a mother from Northern Ireland; he studied at Michigan State University, earned a master's in public administration from Syracuse University, served in the Army and the postwar military government in Germany, worked for the US State Department and later became a vice president of the College Board in New York. His mother, Ruth Bodman Leiserson Sims, raised three children, headed the Connecticut League of Women Voters and served two terms as First Selectman of Greenwich, Connecticut, the first woman and the first Democrat in decades elected to the post.

His maternal grandfather, William Morris "Billy" Leiserson, fled Estonia, then part of the Russian empire, as a child in 1890, worked in a New York shirtwaist factory, talked his way into study with the economist John R. Commons and became one of the first members of the National Labor Relations Board. Sims recalled his grandfather greeting grandchildren with "Well, Chris, what do you think of the present situation of the country?" His uncles Mark Leiserson, a labor economist at Yale and the World Bank, and Avery Leiserson, a Vanderbilt political scientist and president of the American Political Science Association, loved intellectual argument.

From about age five to seven Sims lived in Germany, in Berlin and in Kronberg near Frankfurt, and spoke some German at the time. The family then lived in Hollin Hills, Virginia, and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, when he was 11. At Greenwich High School, from which he graduated in 1959, he played football (third-string linebacker, most of the time, he said) and trombone in the band, and was taught by the mathematician Steven S. Willoughby.

Sims entered Harvard College, majored in mathematics and graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in 1963. His honors thesis generalized Khinchin's version of the coding theorem of information theory to infinite-memory channels, work he later connected to economics through rational inattention. At Harvard he also worked in a student political group opposing nuclear testing and proliferation, played club rugby and weekend soccer, and played trombone in the band.

Encouraged by his uncle Mark Leiserson, he switched to economics. He spent the 1963 to 1964 academic year as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, studying with Dan McFadden, Dale Jorgenson and Richard Lipsey, then returned to Harvard. His adviser, Hendrik S. Houthakker, gave him free rein, and his dissertation, "The dynamics of productivity change: a theoretical and empirical study," earned him a PhD in economics in 1968.

Sims stayed at Harvard as an assistant professor for two years before joining the University of Minnesota in 1970, where he taught for two decades. Thomas Sargent arrived at about the same time, and with Neil Wallace and Edward Prescott the department became known outside Minnesota as a home of "fresh-water" innovators, though Sims said that inside it they argued constantly and represented sharply distinct viewpoints. He also served as an academic consultant in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

In 1977 he delivered the Fisher-Schultz Lecture to the Econometric Society, published in 1980 as "Macroeconomics and Reality." The paper challenged the large-scale macroeconometric models of the era and introduced vector autoregressions as a way to study a whole system of economic time series with few imposed assumptions. Structural VARs allowed researchers to separate the effects of policy surprises from the economy's normal feedback, and by the mid-1980s they had become the standard empirical tool in macroeconomics. With Robert Litterman, Tom Doan and others at the Minneapolis Fed he developed Bayesian VAR forecasting and the "Minnesota prior."

Sims moved to Yale in 1990 as the Henry Ford II Professor of Economics and to Princeton in 1999. At Princeton he was named the Harold H. Helm '20 Professor of Economics and Banking in 2004 and the John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics in 2012. He twice served as director of graduate studies, co-directed the Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies from 2014 to 2021 and stayed on its faculty steering committee until 2024, and was affiliated with the Bendheim Center for Finance and the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance. He was a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund in 2003, a resident scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2012 to 2013, and a visitor at the Philadelphia and Atlanta Feds. He became emeritus in 2021 and kept researching until his 2024 accident.

Sims married Catherine (Cathie) Sears in February 1967, a few months before finishing his dissertation. Their postponed honeymoon became a rushed road trip to the Rocky Mountains, where they woke to find their tent flap frozen shut; Cathie, he wrote, remained skeptical of camping ever after. Their son Ben was born shortly before the move to Minneapolis, and daughters Jody and Nancy were born there. The family spent 20 years in the same house in South Minneapolis.

When Cathie returned to horse riding, Sims learned to ride to keep up with her and eventually bought a horse of his own. He kept playing trombone all his life, including at Princeton economics holiday parties. All four grandchildren joined the family in Stockholm for the 2011 Nobel ceremony. On the morning the prize was announced, he ignored the first pre-dawn call from Sweden; Cathie answered the second.

Sims believed economics should be treated as a science and that hypotheses should be tested with weak, explicitly stated assumptions. He was skeptical of the "revolution" framing of rational expectations: he thought rational expectations ideas were an advance but that the deprecation of Keynesian econometricians was overdone, and he called the rational expectations critique a "cautionary footnote" to econometric policy analysis rather than a deep objection to its foundations. He was similarly doubtful about real business cycle models.

He became convinced that Bayesian and frequentist methods diverge sharply in time series with strong dependence, and from then on taught every course from a Bayesian perspective. In his theoretical work he argued that fiscal policy and the management of public debt matter for inflation, and used the fiscal theory of the price level to warn about fragile foundations of the European monetary union. In June 2024 he was one of 16 Nobel economics laureates who signed an open letter warning that Donald Trump's fiscal and trade policies, combined with efforts to limit the Federal Reserve's independence, would reignite inflation.

Few academics have had as direct an impact on central banks. Structural VARs and Bayesian DSGE models, a term his students credit him with coining, are routine tools at central banks and policy institutions throughout the world, and thousands of SVAR studies have followed his 1977 lecture. His ideas on rational inattention opened a field in macroeconomics and decision theory, and his work on the fiscal theory of the price level shaped later debates about inflation and debt.

He was also a celebrated mentor. His doctoral students included Lars Peter Hansen, who won the Nobel in 2013 and credited Sims's Minnesota teaching with shaping the Generalized Method of Moments, and Harald Uhlig, among many others. Princeton president Christopher L. Eisgruber called him "a pioneer of macroeconomics" whose scholarship "helped revolutionize both his field and real-world policymaking." Alan Blinder called him "an absolute superstar," and Sargent said, "I regard myself as a student of his."

Sims shared the 2011 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (the Sveriges Riksbank Prize) with Thomas J. Sargent, and delivered his Nobel lecture, "Statistical Modeling of Monetary Policy and its Effects," on December 8, 2011. He was a Fellow of the Econometric Society from 1974 and its president in 1995, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1988, the National Academy of Sciences from 1989 and the American Philosophical Society from 2012, president of the American Economic Association in 2012 and a Distinguished Fellow of the AEA in 2013. The University of Minnesota awarded him an honorary degree in 2013, and CERGE-EI in Prague presented him with its Karel Engliš Medal.

His best-known paper is "Macroeconomics and Reality" (Econometrica, 1980). Other influential work includes "Policy Analysis with Econometric Models" with Stephen Goldfeld and Jeffrey Sachs (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1982), "Macroeconomics and Methodology" (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1996), "The Role of Models and Probabilities in the Monetary Policy Process" (Brookings, 2002), research with his student Eric Leeper on monetary policy, and papers on rational inattention and the fiscal theory of the price level. Recorded talks include the Princeton news conference on Nobel day, his Uppsala and Stockholm Nobel lectures, a University of Minnesota public lecture and interviews with the Atlanta Fed and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

No personal controversies are documented. Sims was known as one of the toughest discussants in economics. Sargent recalled that his written comments often began, "This paper is deeply flawed," before Sims added a glimmer of hope. His intellectual disagreements, with monetarism, with the strong form of the rational expectations revolution and over the place of econometrics in graduate training at Minnesota and Yale, were part of why he moved between universities.

Sims was injured in a horseback riding accident in 2024 and remained active in research until then. He died peacefully at his home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on March 14, 2026, at the age of 83, from injuries sustained in that fall, according to a memorial by colleagues Mikkel Plagborg-Møller and Mark Watson; Legacy.com and Wikipedia also attribute his death to injuries from a fall. Princeton announced his death on March 20, 2026, and the AEA, the Econometric Society, the Minneapolis Fed and the Nobel Prize organization published tributes. Funeral and burial details have not been made public. Donations in his honor were requested for the ACLU, the ACLU of Minnesota and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.