The 2026 Nobel Prize in Economics winners announced! Two American economists awarded.

On October 12, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2026 Nobel Prize in Economics would be awarded to Robert E. Hall, a professor at Stanford University, and Michael Woodford, a professor at Columbia University, in recognition of the microeconomic foundations they laid for macroeconomic stabilization policy. Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford received this year's economics prize for showing how economic models can be reconstructed to revitalize stabilization policy. Rather than building models based on statistical relationships among macroeconomic variables such as inflation, output, and consumption, they chose to build on microeconomic foundations. This includes understanding how the aggregate quantities of households and firms influence the economy through their behavior. A core component of these models is that households and firms are forward-looking when making decisions about saving or the prices of their products. When governments and central banks communicate their economic policy plans, they can influence this view of the future and steer the economy in the right direction. Since the introduction of these new models, they have been extremely useful in addressing the economic downturns that affect us. Robert E. Hall was born in 1943 in Palo Alto, California, USA. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 from MIT in Cambridge, USA. He is a professor at Stanford University in California, USA. Michael Woodford was born in 1955 in Chicopee, Massachusetts, USA. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from MIT in Cambridge, USA. He is a professor at Columbia University in New York, USA. Michael Woodford is also an important scholar in modern macroeconomics and monetary policy theory. He has contributed to the theory and practice of monetary policy. He has promoted the use of "forward guidance" by central banks to manage public expectations and inflation dynamics, and has incorporated rational expectations, price adjustment, and monetary policy into a more systematic macroeconomic analytical framework, explaining how central banks' policy actions and their communication affect the decisions of economic agents. He has systematically demonstrated the superiority of rule-based monetary policy, and his theoretical framework has had a profound impact on global macroeconomic regulation.