Political Economy Professor Michael Woodford Wins 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2026 to Michael Woodford, the John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, along with Robert E. Hall of Stanford for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization.

Woodford, who serves on the advisory board of the Center for Political Economy, is the 16^th Columbian to receive this prize in economics and is the University’s 89^th Nobel laureate.

“One of the themes of my work,” Woodford told Columbia News, “is that government authorities shouldn’t view stabilization of the economy as an exercise that is simply conducted by people pulling levers to control the economy independently of what people in the economy understand about this.” 

In February 2025 he was named has been named one of three winners of the Frontiers of Knowledge Award, according to an announcement from the Fundacion BBVA, a science foundation based in Bilbao, Spain. He shared the award with two others  —  Olivier Blanchard of the Paris School of Economics and MIT and Jordi Galí of CREI and Pompeu Fabra University  —  for “profoundly influencing modern macroeconomic analysis by establishing rigorous foundations for the study of business cycle fluctuations,” according to the announcement.