Heterodox Thomas John Sargent (born July 19, 1943) is an American economist and the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University.

In work written in close collaboration with Lucas and Neil Wallace, Thomas J. Sargent contributed fundamentally to the evolution of new classical macroeconomics.

[10] Sargent's main contributions to rational expectations were these: In 1975 he and Wallace proposed the policy-ineffectiveness proposition, which challenged a basic assumption of Keynesian economics.

Sargent has pursued a research program with Ljungqvist[26] designed to understand determinants of differences in unemployment outcomes in Europe and the United States during the last 30 years.

While the institutional differences remained the same over this time period, the microeconomic environment for workers changed, with a higher risk of human capital depreciation in the 1980s.

[31][32] In 2016, Sargent helped found the non-profit QuantEcon project, which is dedicated to the development and documentation of modern open source computational tools for economics, econometrics, and decision making.

[33] Currently he is director of the Sargent Institute of Quantitative Economics and Finance (SIQEF) at Peking University HSBC Business School in Shenzhen.