Former Economics Professor Michael Woodford Wins Nobel Prize

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Michael Woodford

Columbia University

Michael Dean Woodford, a professor at Princeton from 1995 to 2004, was named the 2026 Nobel Prize winner in economics with fellow economist Robert E. Hall on Oct. 12. The pair were honored for their “macroeconomic models that have significantly improved our ability to implement effective stabilization policy,” according to the Nobel Foundation.

“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. With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume,” said John Hassler, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, in a Nobel press release.

Woodford, now a professor at Columbia University, is currently researching why consumers sometimes make seemingly irrational economic decisions and how those decisions affect their lives and the broader economy, according to his Columbia webpage.

Since 1994, Woodford has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. For the last five years, Woodford has also served as a member of the Federal Reserve Bank’s applied macroeconomics and econometrics center advisory board. He has co-authored or co-edited eight books, most recently International Macroeconomics (in 2022).

Woodford is an affiliate member of Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, which is devoted to brain research, and a member of the program on cognitive science’s steering committee. He chaired the economics department from 2022 until 2025.

At a press conference, Woodford said the Nobel news came as “a surprise, but I feel very good about it.”

He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago, where he also previously taught; a law degree from Yale; and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has received other prestigious awards such as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. 

Woodford is the 19th economics Nobel winner who has either studied or taught at Princeton. Most recently, former Princeton professor Claudia Goldin was honored in 2023 for her research explaining the root causes of the wage gap between men and women.

Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 57 Princeton faculty (current or former), research staff, and alumni in all six of the award categories. In 2021, a record five Princetonians were honored with Nobels for economics, chemistry, physics, and peace.

Woodford and this year’s other prize recipients will be honored at a ceremony in Stockholm in December. Woodford and Hall will share a monetary award of 12 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million.