Nobel · Monday, October 12, 2026
Hall and Woodford win Nobel economics prize for work on smoothing booms and busts
The File desk · Oct 12, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC
Status
Confirmed. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press release, dated Oct. 12, 2026.
- Confirmed
The Academy awarded the 2026 economics prize to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.
- Confirmed
The prize is 12 million Swedish kronor, shared equally. The plain-language account of the work is the Academy's.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2026 to Robert E. Hall of Stanford University and Michael Woodford of Columbia University, “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.” The economics prize is 12 million Swedish kronor, shared equally. In plain terms, the Academy says they rebuilt the models governments and central banks use when they cut rates or run a bigger deficit, grounding those models in how households and firms decide about saving and prices. The Academy says the work helps officials respond to shocks such as energy crises.
The announcement is dated Oct. 12, 2026. The Academy says the economy swings between downturns and upturns. Since John Maynard Keynes, governments have tried to smooth those swings: cut interest rates and raise the budget deficit in a recession, and do the opposite when the economy is booming.
The Academy says those older timing models seemed to fail in the oil crises of the 1970s. They did not bring unemployment down, the Academy writes, and inflation ran out of control. Growth was low. Many people thought the effort to smooth the economy had done more harm than good.
Hall and Woodford, the Academy says, rebuilt the models from how households and businesses act, instead of from statistical links among inflation, production, and consumption. Households and businesses look ahead when they save or set prices. When governments and central banks announce their plans, that view of the future can move the economy.
John Hassler, chair of the prize committee, said the laureates’ work “has provided us with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world.” That sentence is his.
Hall was born in 1943 in Palo Alto, California. He earned his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967 and is a professor at Stanford. Woodford was born in 1955 in Chicopee, Massachusetts. He earned his doctorate at MIT in 1983 and is a professor at Columbia.
What is still unknown or disputed
- Whether either laureate has issued a statement. None was fetched.
- The live-stream archive of the announcement. It was not opened.
Primary sources
Every claim in this story is drawn from the documents below. If a fetch failed, that is recorded on the card.
Source 1
The Prize in Economic Sciences 2026
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences · October 12, 2026
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2026 to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.” Prize amount: 12 million Swedish kronor, to be shared equally between the laureates.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2026/press-release/