The two economists who decoded how your expectations steady the whole economy just won the Nobel

Robert Hall of Stanford and Michael Woodford of Columbia spent their careers on a deceptively simple question: what happens when ordinary people look ahead? Their answer - that households and businesses make forward-looking choices about saving, spending and prices, and that governments and central banks can steady the economy by shaping those expectations - became the theoretical backbone of the models central banks use around the world, and proved its worth in the late-2000s financial crisis. On Monday the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded them the 2026 economics prize, the final Nobel of the year, worth 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million) shared equally. Hall, 83, was born in Palo Alto in 1943; Woodford, 71, in Chicopee, Massachusetts in 1955. 'The laureates have helped us smooth out the economy's peaks and troughs,' the academy said.