Christopher Sims

Who they are

Sims was born in Washington, D.C., in 1942. He took a bachelor's degree in mathematics at Harvard in 1963 and a doctorate in economics there in 1968, having begun doctoral study at the University of California, Berkeley. He began teaching at Harvard in 1967, taught at the University of Minnesota for about two decades, and was the Henry Ford II Professor of Economics at Yale from 1990 to 1999. He joined Princeton University in 1999, held the Harold H. Helm Professorship of Economics and Banking from 2004, became the John J. F. Sherrerd University Professor in 2012, and took emeritus status in 2021. He died in March 2026.

He was president of the Econometric Society in 1995 and of the American Economic Association in 2012, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. His best-known contribution to empirical macroeconomics was the structural vector autoregression framework, introduced in a 1980 paper, a data-driven way of modelling how economic variables such as inflation affect one another over time. Among his other roles, he was a resident scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2012 and 2013, a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund in 2003, and co-director of Princeton's Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies from 2013 to 2021, and the University of Minnesota awarded him an honorary degree in 2013. He also worked on the fiscal theory of the price level, on time series econometrics and on information theory, and rational inattention is one of his listed research areas.

Key papers

Sims, C. A. (2003). Implications of rational inattention. Journal of Monetary Economics, 50(3), 665-690. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-3932(03)00029-1

The abstract states the assumption behind the framework: decisions can rely on observations only through a communication channel of limited Shannon capacity. That limit behaves much like a signal extraction problem or an adjustment cost in standard control models, so the resulting framework resembles familiar dynamic rational expectations models. It also has policy implications that differ enough from those models to merit attention.

Sims, C. A. (1980). Macroeconomics and reality. The paper that introduced the structural vector autoregression approach.

Key ideas

Rational inattention treats attention as a limited channel through which information must pass before it can inform a decision. The scarcity is built into the model rather than added afterwards.

The idea is connected to the attention economy only at the level of the premise. Sims's paper does not describe media, advertising or the trade in audience attention, and this site cites it to show that economists were already modelling limited attention before and alongside the argument for an attention economy.

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