Americans Robert Hall and Michael Woodford won the 2026 Nobel economics prize “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.
The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the final prize to be given out this year and is worth 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million).
The economics prize, first awarded in 1969, is not one of the original five awards created in the 1895 will of industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, but was established by Sweden’s central bank.
The majority of previous laureates have been from the United States. Only three women have ever won, most recently Claudia Goldin in 2023 for work on how gender has affected pay and employment over time in the United States.
Analysis by the Institute for Scientific Information, part of Clarivate, had picked researchers working on monetary policy, the economics of information technology and evolutionary economic theory as possible recipients.
Last year’s winners, Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, won for work on “creative destruction” and how new technology and production methods can boost growth and living standards.
The Nobel prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were announced last week.
