Economists Robert Hall of Stanford and Michael Woodford of Columbia University, both American, whose models help central banks fight inflation, won the highest prize in their field: the Nobel.
Practice puzzle. It does not touch your streak or today's stats.
Kept 'Stanford' or 'Columbia'? Where they work, and the strongest wrong words in the sentence: true, and more famous than the men, but a story is told by who did what, not by where they are employed. Kept 'Hall' or 'Woodford'? Their names, which few people know. Kept 'inflation', 'models' or 'central banks'? That is what the prize was for. Kept 'highest' or 'field'? That is what a Nobel is. This one really happened. On Monday 12 October the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave the 2026 prize in economic sciences, the one everyone calls the economics Nobel, to Robert E. Hall of Stanford University and Michael Woodford of Columbia University, 'for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation'. In plain words: after the oil crises of the 1970s, the old models for steering an economy stopped working, and many economists thought the whole idea of smoothing booms and busts should be dropped. Hall and Woodford built new ones, and they are the models central banks and finance ministries now use to decide when to raise rates or spend, to keep a slowdown from becoming a long recession and a boom from becoming runaway inflation.