Two American researchers have been awarded the Nobel Prize for economics for studying the interplay of climate change and technological innovation with economics.
William Nordhaus of Yale University and Paul Romer of New York University were announced winners of the 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The academy said Romer’s work “explains how ideas are different to other goods and require specific conditions to thrive in a market.” Previous macroeconomic research had emphasized technological innovation as a driver of growth but had not modelled how market conditions and economic decisions affected creation of new technologies, the academy said.
Nordhaus in the 1990s became the first person to create a model that “describes the global interplay between the economy and the climate,” the academy said. He showed that “the most efficient remedy for problems caused by greenhouse gases is a global scheme of universally imposed carbon taxes.”
He has been a faculty member at Yale since 1967.
The economics prize is the last of the Nobels to be announced this year. Last year’s prize went to American Richard Thaler for studying how human irrationality affects economic theory.
The peace prize was awarded Friday to Denis Mukwege of Congo and Iraqi Nadia Murad for their work to draw attention to how sexual violence is used as a weapon of war.
