Remembering Christopher Sims, Pioneering Macroeconomist (1942-2026)

With great sadness, we have learned that Chris Sims, a former member of the economics faculty at the University of Minnesota, passed away Saturday, March 14. Chris was one of the leading macroeconomists of his generation and shared the 2011 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his empirical research on "cause and effect in the macroeconomy." Our thoughts are with his family and his many students, colleagues and collaborators around the world.

Chris served on the faculty at Minnesota from 1970 to 1990. While here he developed pioneering empirical methods that reshaped the study of macroeconomics. His work on vector autoregressions (VARs) provided economists with a powerful framework for tracing how shocks — such as unexpected changes in monetary policy — affect the economy over time. By allowing the data to reveal the dynamic relationships among macroeconomic variables rather than imposing strong theoretical restrictions in advance, this approach opened a new empirical frontier for studying economic fluctuations and economic policy.

Chris's legacy at Minnesota also includes the many graduate students he trained and mentored. His students and collaborators went on to become leaders in academia and policy institutions around the world. Through them — and through the ideas he helped launch while at Minnesota — his intellectual legacy continues to shape economics.

After leaving Minnesota in 1990, Chris served on the faculty at Yale University and later at Princeton University, where he was the John J.F. Sherrerd '51 University Professor of Economics. Over the course of his career he held many leadership roles in the profession, including serving as president of the Econometric Society and later as president of the American Economic Association.

In September 2013 the University of Minnesota awarded Chris an honorary doctor of science degree recognizing his pioneering contributions to macroeconomics. In August 2019 he returned to celebrate the 50-year partnership between the University of Minnesota and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, an event that brought together Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, Chris Sims and Neil Wallace — the group known during their years at Minnesota as the "Four Horsemen." Their extraordinary work transformed modern macroeconomics.

Chris Sims's ideas reshaped empirical macroeconomics and remain central to how economists and policymakers understand the economy. He will be greatly missed.