UM Doctor of Business Administration honoris causa gives talk on redistribution and insurance in US household data

The University of Macau (UM) held a UM Doctor honoris causa Lecture today (28 November). Thomas J. Sargent, recipient of the Doctor of Business Administration honoris causa from UM and the 2011 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, delivered a talk titled ‘Quantifying Redistribution and Insurance in U.S. Household Data’, where he shared his latest research findings. The lecture attracted a large and diverse audience.

In his speech, Michael Hui, vice rector of UM, highlighted Prof Sargent’s remarkable achievements, particularly his empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011. Hui also emphasised that Prof Sargent’s pioneering contributions to macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time-series econometrics have profoundly shaped modern economic theory and public policy.

During the lecture, Prof Sargent presented his latest research, which employs additive functionals and dynamic mode decompositions to analyse the co-evolution of private earned income, post-tax-and-transfer income, and consumption in US household data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. He also examined how cross-sectional inequality and redistribution interact with aggregate income, offering insights with important implications for economic welfare evaluation and policy design.

The event concluded with a Q&A session moderated by Yu Jun, dean of the Faculty of Business Administration at UM, during which Prof Sargent actively engaged in discussions with participants on the lecture’s topic.