Lars Peter Hansen, one of the three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is to visit Taiwan next year, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER) president Wu Chung-shu (吳中書) said.
Hansen is the son-in-law of Chiang Shou-chieh (蔣碩傑), the institution’s founder and first chairman, Wu added.
The CIER will invite Hansen, a professor at the University of Chicago, to attend a series of activities commemorating the 20th anniversary of Chiang’s death next year, Wu said.
Saying that Hansen has visited the country many times, Wu said that in addition to attending various Taiwan-sponsored international economic forums, the Nobel laureate has come to Taiwan before to see relatives or attend events commemorating his late father-in-law.
Chiang, a renowned economist who was an academic at Academia Sinica and a trusted economic adviser to former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1982.
Wu said Hansen winning this year’s prize could be seen as redress for Chiang Shou-chieh not receiving the coveted award.
Hansen is a cofounder of the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, which builds on the legacy of Milton Friedman.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave the Nobel to Hansen and fellow US economists Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller on Monday for their research on how financial markets work and how assets are priced.
The three economists “laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices,” the academy said.
Their work spans almost 50 years, beginning with the finding made by Fama, who is also at the University of Chicago, that it is difficult to predict price movements in the short run. That conclusion forms the basis for the theory that financial markets are efficient and led to the development of stock-index funds.
Wu said that Shiller, 67, a Yale University professor, has also visited Taiwan several times, most recently in May to attend a seminar in Taipei. In November last year, he delivered a keynote speech at a forum sponsored by a local magazine.
Lin Ming-jen (林明仁), an associate professor of economics at National Taiwan University, said that he once attended a class given by Hansen while he was doing a doctorate at the University of Chicago.
“Hansen is a true master in both economics and finance,” Lin said.
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Narayana Kocherlakota on Monday said Hansen’s “remarkably general empirical methods free researchers from the need to make a range of empirically implausible statistical assumptions about the data that they are studying.”
Hansen served as Kocherlakota’s adviser at the University of Chicago.
Civil society groups yesterday protested outside the Legislative Yuan, decrying Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) efforts to pass three major bills that they said would seriously harm Taiwan’s democracy, and called to oust KMT caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁). It was the second night of the three-day “Bluebird wintertime action” protests in Taipei, with organizers announcing that 8,000 people attended. Organized by Taiwan Citizen Front, the Economic Democracy Union (EDU) and a coalition of civil groups, about 6,000 people began a demonstration in front of KMT party headquarters in Taipei on Wednesday, organizers said. For the third day, the organizers asked people to assemble
POOR IMPLEMENTATION: Teachers welcomed the suspension, saying that the scheme disrupted school schedules, quality of learning and the milk market A policy to offer free milk to all school-age children nationwide is to be suspended next year due to multiple problems arising from implementation of the policy, the Executive Yuan announced yesterday. The policy was designed to increase the calcium intake of school-age children in Taiwan by drinking milk, as more than 80 percent drink less than 240ml per day. The recommended amount is 480ml. It was also implemented to help Taiwanese dairy farmers counter competition from fresh milk produced in New Zealand, which is to be imported to Taiwan tariff-free next year when the Agreement Between New Zealand and
A woman who allegedly spiked the food and drinks of an Australian man with rat poison, leaving him in intensive care, has been charged with attempted murder, the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said yesterday. The woman, identified by her surname Yang (楊), is accused of repeatedly poisoning Alex Shorey over the course of several months last year to prevent the Australian man from leaving Taiwan, prosecutors said in a statement. Shorey was evacuated back to Australia on May 3 last year after being admitted to intensive care in Taiwan. According to prosecutors, Yang put bromadiolone, a rodenticide that prevents blood from
A Japanese space rocket carrying a Taiwanese satellite blasted off yesterday, but was later seen spiraling downward in the distance as the company said the launch attempt had failed. It was the second attempt by the Japanese start-up Space One to become the country’s first private firm to put a satellite into orbit, after its first try in March ended in a mid-air explosion. This time, its solid-fuel Kairos rocket had been carrying five satellites, including one from the Taiwan Space Agency and others designed by Japanese students and corporate ventures. Spectators gathered near the company’s coastal Spaceport Kii launch pad in Japan’s
RSS