The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford, honouring work on the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation — the research that helps governments and central banks smooth out the economy's peaks and troughs.
Hall, a Stanford professor and senior fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution, chairs the committee that dates U.S. business cycles and is known for research linking household expectations about future income to spending today. Woodford, the John Bates Clark Professor at Columbia, wrote the influential Interest and Prices and formalized how central-bank signalling about future rates — forward guidance — shapes inflation and employment.
The committee said their models made it possible to manage major crises far more effectively, from the pandemic to recent energy shocks, by grounding policy in how households and firms actually make decisions rather than in statistical shortcuts. Woodford, reached by phone during the announcement, called the award a tremendous honour and a surprise.
The pair will share 12 million Swedish kronor, about US$1.2 million. The economics award, created by Sweden's central bank in 1968 rather than by Alfred Nobel's will, concludes the 2026 Nobel announcements.
Hall and Woodford are scheduled to receive their medals at the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, alongside this year's laureates in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.
