When I think of Neil, one word comes to mind: integrity. Neil’s evaluation
of my book with Velde was no worse than his evaluation of the papers that he
and I wrote together. Except for our paper on commodity money, not our best
in my opinion, Neil asked me to remove his name from every paper that he and
I wrote together.
Evans and Honkapohja: Was he being generous?
Sargent: I don’t think so. He thought the papers should not be published.
After he read the introduction to one of our JPE papers, Bob Lucas told me
that no referee could possibly say anything more derogatory about our paper
than what we had written about it ourselves. Neil wrote those critical words.
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