Robert Hall and Michael Woodford win the 2026 economics prize
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the economics prize in memory of Alfred Nobel to Robert Hall and Michael Woodford in Stockholm on 12 October 2026. It recognizes their research on the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization.
Hall teaches at Stanford and Woodford at Columbia. According to Associated Press, they will share prize money of 12 million Swedish kronor.
Their contributions allow models of the economy to be built from household and business choices, rather than statistical relationships between aggregate indicators alone. According to the committee’s explanation relayed by Columbia, this approach helps explain how public policies can dampen economic fluctuations.
MIT highlights Hall’s research on expectations and household consumption, alongside the framework Woodford developed in his 2003 book Interest and Prices.