“I feel very lucky to have had an incredibly rich array of graduate students. Right after the Nobel Prize announcement, before we went to Stockholm, a bunch of my former graduate students put on a conference here in Chicago. It was extremely exciting to see the breadth of what they were doing. They weren’t like Lars Hansen clones; they were off doing their own thing.
I suspect my influence was not always direct because often I wasn’t telling them what to work on. Maybe I was giving them an interesting perspective on important problems to work on and maybe I was trying to convince them to take modeling seriously. Perhaps I pushed them in some ways, but the exciting thing has been to see the breadth of their range of accomplishments.”
A faculty member of the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics since 1981, Hansen regularly teaches courses in time series econometrics, asset pricing, and macroeconomics. He also remains actively involved in the PhD program in financial economics, a joint program with the University of Chicago School of Business that he helped establish.
Advising and mentoring doctoral students is an important part of Hansen’s teaching role. He has guided many accomplished students through their degrees, and is proud that they have gone on to play significant roles around the world in academic research, in finance, and in policymaking.
In 1998, Hansen received the University of Chicago’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching for year 1997–98.