When one drags the mouse over Professor Jansson’s name on the economics 240A website (http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/mjansson/Courses/ECON240A_FALL02/ECON240A.html), a curious thing happens – the image of the Campanile in the corner of the page is replaced by a picture of Star Wars villain Darth Vader.  Apparently, graduate students call Dr. Jansson Darth Vader because he is so hard that he scares them.  Despite this intimidating billing, I found Dr. Jansson to be a very friendly and approachable person.

Dr. Jansson completed all of his formal education at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.  After completing his doctorate in 2000, he came directly to UC Berkeley, and is currently an assistant professor.  Dr. Jansson does theoretical research into time series econometrics.  This makes him unique among Berkeley economists, as other econometricians here focus on cross-section econometrics.

Dr. Jansson’s dissertation focused on cointegration econometric models, which are popular among macroeconomists.  Dr. Jansson focused on developing statistical tests to verify whether the model’s underlying assumptions have been met, and thus if the test can be applied.  These tests help to insure that econometric methods give correct results.

Since Dr. Jansson’s research is theoretical, he uses data mostly for illustrative rather than empirical purposes.  In particular, data is used to show how his method works and is implemented.  Consequently, Dr. Jansson doesn’t collect data himself, and tends to use readily available datasets, like those available online through the UC Berkeley library website.

A recent paper used the illustration of comparing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to analysts’ forecasts of the level of inflation.  Theory predicts that the forecasts should approximate the CPI, but existing tests could not verify this result empirically.  Applying cointegration techniques using Dr. Jansson’s method verified that the CPI followed forecasts.  This suggests that the older methodology is flawed.