George Evans was born in New York City, grew up in Los Altos Hills,
California, and went to high school in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He has worked
and lived in England and Scotland as well as California and Oregon. He is
married and has two sons, aged 22 and 20.
Professor Evans received a B.A. in Mathematics, 1974 (Phi Beta Kappa), an M.A. in Statistics, 1976, and a Ph. D. in Economics, 1980, from the University of California at Berkeley. He also studied P.P.E. (Politics and Economics) at Balliol College, Oxford, England and received a B.A. from the University of Oxford, 1972.
Professor Evans's first full-time academic appointments were at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and then at Stanford University from 1981-1987. In 1983-4 he visited the London School of Economics and then in 1987 he joined the Economics Department at the L.S.E., where he remained until 1993. During 1993-4 he was the George Watson and Daniel Stewart Professor of Political Economy at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. In September 1994 he came to the University of Oregon as the first John B. Hamacher Professor of Economics, a newly endowed Chair. He was named a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in 2005. From October 2007 he has also held an appointment as Part Time SIRE Professor of Economics and Finance, University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
Professor Evans has served as a consultant or visiting scholar at the Financial Markets Group, L.S.E. (1990-2), the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Summer 1992), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington D.C. (4/97 and 4/2001), and the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland (3/2002, 4/2003, 5/2004, 9/2005, 7/2006) and St. Louis (5/2003, 9/2005, 7/2006). During 1991-2 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Business Administration. He was a Distinguished Visitor at U.C. San Diego in March 1995, Professor Invité, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, Paris, April 1996 and June 2001, Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Monetary and Economic Statistics, Bank of Japan, Tokyo, 4/2007, and Professeur Invité, Université Paris X - Nanterre, France, September 2007. He has been asked to give lectures on adaptive learning, economic dynamics and monetary policy at the LSE (Fall 1993), UCLA (Winter 1994), the University of Helsinki (June 1995), the Stockholm School of Economics (April 1998), the Bank of Finland (February 2000), the IMF Institute (August 2007), and the Université de Paris X – Nanterre (9/2007). With Seppo Honkapohja he gave a Plenary Address to the Society of Computational Economics (Seattle, 7/2003) an invited talk to the Chief Economists' Workshop at the Bank of England (May 2006) and an invited talk to the Economic Summit, Central Bank of Chile (November 2007).
Professor Evans has been a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review (1991-94), of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (from 1995) and of Macroeconomic Dynamics (from 1996) and since 1995 has been on the Board of Advisors of the Journal of Economic Surveys.
He has been the recipient of five National Science Foundation Grants and one European Community SPES grant.
George Evans has investigated a wide range of theoretical and empirical topics in macroeconomics including tests for speculative bubbles, the effect of sectoral imbalance on unemployment, the decomposition of aggregate output into trend and cycle, and the formulation of theoretical models of endogenous fluctuations. In his work on "rational bubbles" he has examined the statistical evidence for the presence of bubbles in foreign exchange rates and in stock prices. Econometric work on business cycles showed how to extract the cyclical component of GDP using multivariate forecasting methods.
Professor Evans is best known for his research on expectational stability and learning in stochastic, dynamic models with multiple equilibria. In these models, economic agents are assumed to have bounded rationality in making forecasts -- e.g. to use simple or sophisticated extrapolative rules. Because agents learn and adapt to forecast errors, they may, in the long run, approximate full rationality. The techniques are used, in particular, to determine when the economy can become trapped into cycles, "sunspot equilibria" or hyperinflationary paths, and how macroeconomic policy can steer the economy away from these inefficient outcomes.
Recent research has continued to focus on the role of expectations in macroeconomic fluctuations. One project showed how complementarities can lead to "growth cycles" generated by self-fulfilling fluctuations in business confidence and investment. Another recent project examined the effects of fiscal restrictions on inflation and monetary stability. A major focus of current research is the role of expectations and learning in optimal monetary policy design and in the interaction of monetary and fiscal policy. Other current research includes new technical results on the existence of adaptively stable sunspot equilibria, with applications to monetary models, an examination of the importance of heterogeneous expectations, and applications of learning theory to asset prices.
Professor Evans collaborates with economists from the UK,
France, Spain, Germany, Finland and the United States.
His principal teaching interests are in Macroeconomics and Econometrics. At the University of Oregon, Professor Evans has taught core macroeconomic theory, advanced topics in macroeconomics and time series analysis, at the graduate level, and intermediate macroeconomics at the undergraduate level.
Previously he has also taught courses at the graduate level in
monetary economics and in econometrics and at the undergraduate
level in applied macroeconomics, econometrics, mathematical
economics, forecasting, introductory statistics and macroeconomic
principles.
“Learning and Macroeconomics” (with Seppo Honkapohja), invited paper
for the Annual Review of Economics.
“Learning about Risk and Return: A Simple Model of Bubbles and Crashes”
(with William Branch)
“Anticipated Fiscal Policy
and Adaptive Learning” (with Seppo Honkapohja
and Kaushik Mitra)
“Liquidity Traps,
Learning and Stagnation,” (with Eran Guse and Seppo Honkapohja),
European Economic Review, in press.
“Representations and
Sunspot Stability” (with Bruce McGough).
“Asset Return Dynamics and
Learning”
(with William A. Branch).
“Stable Finite-State
Markov Sunspots” (with Bruce McGough).
“Generalized Stochastic Gradient Learning” (with Seppo Honkapohja and
Noah Williams)
“A Model of
Near-Rational Exuberance”
(with James Bullard and Seppo
Honkapohja).
“Monetary Policy, Endogenous Inattention, and the Volatility
Trade-off” (with William A. Branch, John Carlson and Bruce McGough),
forthcoming Economic Journal.
Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics (with Seppo Honkapohja), Princeton University Press, January 2001.
“Learning in Macroeconomics” (with Seppo Honkapohja), forthcoming in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, second edition.
“Economics of Expectations” (with Seppo Honkapohja), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier Science, 2001.
“Monetary Policy, Judgment and Near-Rational Exuberance” (with James Bullard and Seppo Honkapohja), American Economic Review, Vol. 98, 2008.
“Can Perpetual Learning Explain the Forward Premium Puzzle?” (with Avik Chakraborty), Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 55, 2008
“Policy Interaction,
Learning and the Fiscal Theory of Prices” (with Seppo
“Optimal Constrained Interest-Rate Rules” (with Bruce McGough), Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Vol. 39, 2007.
“Model Uncertainty and Endogenous Volatility” (with William A. Branch), Review of Economic Dynamics, Vol. 10, 2007.
“Stable Sunspot Equilibria in a Cash-in-Advance Model” (with Seppo Honkapohja and Ramon Marimon), The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, Vol. 7 (Advances), 2007.
“The E-Correspondence Principle” (with Seppo Honkapohja), Economica, Vol. 74, 2007.
“Are Hyperinflationary Paths Learnable?” (with Klaus Adam and Seppo Honkapohja), Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Vol. 30, 2006.
“Adaptive Expectations, Underparameterization and the Lucas Critique” (with Garey Ramey), Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 53, 2006.
“Monetary Policy, Expectations and Commitment” (with Seppo
“A Simple Recursive Forecasting Model” (with William A. Branch), Economics Letters, Vol. 91, 2006.
“Intrinsic Heterogeneity in Expectation Formation” (with William Branch),
Journal of Economic
Theory, Vol. 127, 2006.
“Coordination on Saddle Path Solutions: the Eductive Viewpoint -
Linear Multivariate Models” (with Roger Guesnerie),
Journal of Economic Theory, Vol. 124, 2005.
“Monetary Policy, Indeterminacy and Learning” (with Bruce McGough), Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Vol. 29, 2005.
“Indeterminacy and the Stability Puzzle in Non-Convex Economies” (with Bruce McGough), Contributions to Macroeconomics, Vol. 5: No. 1, 2005.
“Policy Interaction, Expectations and the Liquidity Trap” (with Seppo Honkapohja), Review of Economic Dynamics, Vol. 8, 2005.
“Stable Sunspot Solutions in Models with Predetermined Variables” (with Bruce McGough), Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Vol. 29, 2005.
“Adaptive Learning and Monetary Policy Design” (with Seppo Honkapohja), Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Vol. 35, 2003.
“Expectations and the
Stability Problem for Optimal Monetary Policies” (with Seppo
“Existence
of Adaptively Stable Sunspot Equilibria near an Indeterminate Steady State” (with Seppo
“Coordination on Saddle Path Solutions: the Eductive Viewpoint - Linear Univariate Models” (with Roger Guesnerie), Macroeconomics Dynamics, Vol. 7, 2003.
“Convergence in Monetary Inflation Models with Heterogeneous Learning Rules” (with Seppo Honkapohja and Ramon Marimon), Macroeconomics Dynamics, Vol. 5, 2001.
"Learning Dynamics" (with Seppo Honkapohja), Chapter 7 in the Handbook of Macroeconomics, Vol. 1, eds. J. Taylor and M. Woodford. Elsevier, 1999.
"Growth Cycles", American Economic Review, vol. 88, 1998, with Seppo Honkapohja and Paul Romer.
"Economic Dynamics with Learning: New Stability Results” Review of Economic Studies, vol. 65, 1998, with Seppo Honkapohja.
"Stochastic Gradient Learning in the Cobweb Model" (with Seppo Honkapohja), Economics Letters, vol. 61, 1998.
"Calculation, Adaptation and Rational Expectations", Macroeconomic Dynamics, vol. 2, 1998, with Garey Ramey.
"Local Convergence of Recursive Learning to Steady States and Cycles in Stochastic Nonlinear Models", Econometrica, vol. 63, 1995, with Seppo Honkapohja.
"Information, Forecasts and Measurement of the Business Cycle", Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 33, 1994, with Lucrezia Reichlin.
"Learning, Convergence and Stability with Multiple Rational Expectations Equilibria," European Economic Review, vol. 38, 1994, with Seppo Honkapohja.
"On the Stability of Sunspot Equilibria under Adaptive Learning Rules, Journal of Economic Theory, vol. 64, 1994, with Seppo Honkapohja.
"Sectoral Imbalance and Unemployment in the United Kingdom", Oxford Economic Papers, vol. 45, 1993.
"On the Preservation of Deterministic Cycles when some Agents Perceive them to be Random Fluctuations", Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, vol. 17, 1993, with Seppo Honkapohja and Thomas J. Sargent.
"Rationalizability, Strong Rationality and Expectational Stability, Games and Economic Behavior, vol. 5, 1993, with Roger Guesnerie.
"Expectation Calculation and Macroeconomic Dynamics," American Economic Review, vol. 82, March 1992, with Garey Ramey.
"Pitfalls in Testing for Bubbles in Asset Prices", American Economic Review, vol. 81, September 1991.
"Output and Unemployment Dynamics in the United States: 1950-1985, " Journal of Applied Econometrics, vol. 4, 1989.
"The Fragility of Sunspots and Bubbles," Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 23, 1989.
"A Test for Speculative Bubbles in the Sterling-Dollar Exchange Rate: 1981-84," American Economic Review, vol. 76, 1986.
"Expectational Stability and the Multiple Equilibria Problem in Linear Rational Expectations Models," Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 100, 1985.
"Bottlenecks
and the Phillips Curve: a Disaggregrated Keynesian Model of Inflation, Output
and Unemployment," Economic Journal, vol. 85, 1985.
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