The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for economics to Yale University’s William Nordhaus and New York University’s Paul Romer.

The Academy said Nordhaus and Romer “have designed methods for addressing some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable economic growth.”

Nordhaus was awarded the prize “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis”.  In the 1990s, he created a model describing how the economy and the climate affect each other on the global stage, according to the Academy.

Romer was recognized “for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis.”  The Academy said Romer’s research is the first to model how market conditions and economic decisions affect creation of new technologies.

Nordhaus, who earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967, and Romer, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1983 will split the the $1.01 million prize.

The economics prize is the last of the Nobel prizes to be awarded this year.  

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to  Nadia Murad, a Yazidi human rights activist and survivor of sexual slavery by Islamic State in Iraq, and Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist treating victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Last year’s Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to American Richarld Thaler for his research on how human irrationality affects economic theory.

 
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