Robert E. Hall (PhD ’67) and Michael Woodford (PhD ’83), both MIT doctorate holders, have been awarded the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Hall is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Woodford holds the John Bates Clark Professorship of Political Economy at Columbia University. The Nobel citation praised their work for “significantly improving our ability to implement effective stabilization policy” and highlighted how each integrated micro‑economic analysis into macro‑economic models.
For Hall, the committee singled out his late‑1970s research that shed new light on economic expectations and household consumption. Woodford was recognized for his 2003 book Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy, which presented a comprehensive macro model built on micro foundations and became a cornerstone of modern New Keynesian models. These models now form the backbone of global economic stabilization policies.
Hall earned his BA in economics from UC Berkeley before completing his PhD at MIT. Woodford received a BA from the University of Chicago and a JD from Yale Law School before his MIT doctorate. Notably, Hall is the fifth Nobel laureate in economics who was principally advised by MIT economist Robert M. Solow; the others are George Akerlof, Peter Diamond, William Nordhaus, and Joseph Stiglitz. Solow himself won the Nobel in 1987, and his former biology Nobel laureate student H. Robert Horvitz wrote an undergraduate economics thesis under Solow’s supervision.
Woodford’s doctoral advisor was Timothy Kehoe of the University of Minnesota, and Woodford acknowledges Solow in his thesis for helping him “distinguish important problems from exercises of merely technical interest.” To date, 17 MIT alumni have received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences—10 while serving on the MIT faculty and another eight former faculty members have also been honored.
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