Two americans win nobel economics prize

Americans Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims won the Nobel economics prize on Monday "for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy," The prize committee said the winners have developed methods for answering questions such as how economic growth and inflation are affected by a temporary increase in the interest rate or a tax cut. Sargent is a professor at New York University, and Sims is a professor at Princeton University.

Sims developed a method based on so-called "vector autoregression" to analyze how the economy is affected by temporary changes in economic policy and other factors, like an increase in the interest rate, the academy said. The economics prize capped this year's Nobel announcements. The awards will be handed out on Dec. 10 the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death. The economics prize is not among the original awards established in Nobel's 1895 will, but was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in his memory.