Thomas Sargent, the winner of 2011 Nobel Prize in economics, has been appointed as a full-time professor at Seoul National University.

The school announced that the 69-year-old economist will start to teach undergraduate and graduate students starting next year.

Sargent is one of the architects of the rational expectations hypothesis that swept through macroeconomics in the 1970s-80s.

He is currently teaching at New York University and is also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Sargent held a special lecture for SNU students last year, and said at that time he wanted to come back to teach in Seoul, according to the university.

His contract has yet to be officially finalized, but SNU reportedly offered him 1.5 billion won ($1.3 million) in research funding.

Previously, he was a professor of economics at Stanford from 1998 to 2002.

He won the Nobel prize along with Princeton University professor Christopher Sims “for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.“

By Oh Kyu-wook (596story@heraldcorp.com)