Economic Sciences · Oct 12, 2026
Michael Woodford
“for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation”
- Born
- Chicopee, Massachusetts, USA, 1955
- Age at award
- 70
- Affiliation at award
- Columbia University
Key work
Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy, Princeton University Press, 2003
Sources1nobelprize.org
Career
- 1977BA, University of Chicago
- 1980JD, Yale Law School
- 1983PhD in economics, MIT, under Timothy Kehoe
- 1984Columbia hires him, “when it was much less obvious what I would accomplish”
- ThenTeaches at Chicago and Princeton
- 2003Publishes Interest and Prices, his book on monetary policy
- 2004Returns to Columbia as John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy
Lesser-known facts
- Calls his framework “neo-Wicksellian,” after the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell.
- Early research covered sunspot equilibria and imperfect competition.
- Credits his students: he works ideas out by explaining them to people willing to put up with it.
Mentors and collaborators
- Doctoral advisor
- Timothy Kehoe
- Early collaborator
- Julio Rotemberg, on one of the first microfounded New Keynesian models
- Co-laureate
- Robert E. Hall, whose 1978 consumption insight fed into Woodford's models
