Robert E. Hall

Robert E. Hall was born in 1943 in Palo Alto, California, and attended school in Palo Alto and Los Angeles.⁠[1][2]

He later credited California taxpayers for his public schooling and the federal government for funding his graduate study at MIT, saying he hoped they would regard the prize as “a satisfactory return on their investment.”⁠[3]

In 1964 Hall received a BA in economics, summa cum laude, from the University of California, Berkeley, and held a Woodrow Wilson fellowship in 1964–1965.⁠[1][4]

In 1967 he earned a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).⁠[1][4]

After his doctorate Hall returned to the University of California, Berkeley, serving as assistant professor from 1967 to 1969 and acting associate professor from 1969 to 1970, and held a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1969–1970. From 1970 to 1972 he was also a member of an advisory panel for economics.⁠[1][4]

In 1970 Hall moved to MIT, where he was associate professor from 1970 to 1974 and professor of economics from 1974 to 1978. In 1973 he was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society.⁠[1][4]

From 1977 Hall directed the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) research program on Economic Fluctuations and Growth until 2013, as its founding director. He is also an NBER research associate affiliated with the programs on Economic Fluctuations and Growth, Monetary Economics, and Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship.⁠[5][6]

In 1977–1978 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, and from 1978 to 1981 he directed NBER’s Project on Inflation; he edited the volume Inflation: Causes and Effects, published by the University of Chicago Press for NBER in 1982.⁠[1][5]

In 1978 Hall joined Stanford University’s Department of Economics and the Hoover Institution as professor of economics and senior fellow, later holding the joint endowed position funded by Robert and Carole McNeil.⁠[4][3][7]

In December of that year he published “Stochastic Implications of the Life Cycle-Permanent Income Hypothesis: Theory and Evidence” in the Journal of Political Economy, testing how households decide what to spend. The work later became a building block of the New Keynesian model that central banks use to set interest rates.⁠[5][3]

Also from 1978, Hall chaired NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, which took its present structure that year and maintains the semiofficial chronology of US business cycles.⁠[8][7]

On July 26, 1979, the Business Cycle Dating Committee met and issued a statement the next day, signed by Hall as “Chairman”; its members included William Branson, Martin Feldstein, Benjamin Friedman, Robert Gordon and Geoffrey Moore.⁠[9]

In December 1981 Hall and his Hoover Institution colleague Alvin Rabushka published an article in the Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry that set off a wave of interest in the flat tax. The two went on to write Low Tax, Simple Tax, Flat Tax (McGraw-Hill, 1983) and The Flat Tax (Hoover Institution Press, 1985; second edition 1995), and Money magazine recognized them in its “Money Hall of Fame” for financial innovation.⁠[2][10][5]

In 1985 Hall was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. That year also saw the publication of the textbook Macroeconomics: Theory, Performance, and Policy, written with John B. Taylor; later editions, prepared with David Papell, reached a sixth edition in 2005.⁠[4][1][5]

In 1990 he published The Rational Consumer (MIT Press), followed in 1991 by Booms and Recessions in a Noisy Economy (Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry Press).⁠[5]

From 1993 Hall served on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisors. He has also sat on the advisory committees of Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the NBER Macroeconomics Annual and the Journal of Economic Perspectives.⁠[5]

In February 1999 he and Charles I. Jones published “Why Do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output per Worker than Others?” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.⁠[5]

In 2001 Hall delivered the Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association, and W. W. Norton published his Digital Dealing: How e-Markets Are Transforming the Economy, on the economics of high technology such as the Internet. He describes himself as “an applied economist” with interests in technology, competition, employment and economic policy.⁠[2][10][7]

In 2004 Hall was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.⁠[4]

In 2005 he served as vice president of the American Economic Association and published “Employment Fluctuations with Equilibrium Wage Stickiness” in the American Economic Review.⁠[4][5]

In 2010 Hall served as president of the American Economic Association, and Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry Press published his book Forward-Looking Decision Making. In 2011 the association named him a Distinguished Fellow.⁠[5][3]

Hall led NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee until 2024 and then resigned from the committee; NBER noted the change in May 2025 when it announced that Kristin Forbes had joined the committee.⁠[8][3]

On October 12, 2026, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm that the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred NobelAlfred NobelAlfred Nobel (1833–1896) was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor and industrialist who invented dynamite, the blasting cap, blasting gelatine and the smokeless powder ballistite and founded enterprises in more than 20 countries. Through his will he left his fortune to establish the five Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.Open the full entry would go to Hall and Michael Woodford of Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.” The prize money of 12 million Swedish kronor is shared by the two.⁠[11][12][3]

The academy said the laureates chose to build their models on a microeconomic foundation rather than on statistical links between macroeconomic variables, and that “The laureates have helped us smooth out the economy’s peaks and troughs.” John Hassler, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said their work provided “a stable theoretical foundation” for the models now used by central banks and governments, leaving them better equipped to deal with shocks such as energy crises or sudden changes in household consumption.⁠[12][13]

Hall was 83 when the prize was announced. In a Hoover Institution statement he called it “a wonderful surprise” and said he had spent his career trying to understand how the economy works, “following interesting questions wherever they led.” Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice called him “one of the most distinguished economists of his generation”; he is the sixth Hoover economist in the past half-century to receive the prize.⁠[2][3][14][15]

As of October 25, 2026, Hall is professor emeritus of economics in Stanford University’s School of Humanities and Sciences, Robert and Carole McNeil Endowed Professor, and senior fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution, and he is listed to teach a macroeconomics seminar in the 2026–2027 academic year.⁠[14][4]

Hall is married to economist Susan Woodward, whom he called “my wonderful wife and coauthor, Susan” in his prize statement; their son is named Andy. Hall lives in Menlo Park, California.⁠[2][14]

Hall has advised the Justice Department, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board, served on President-elect Ronald Reagan’s Task Force on Inflation Policy and on the National Presidential Advisory Committee on Productivity, and testified before congressional committees. He also served on the National Science Foundation’s oversight panel for economics (1989) and, from 2015 to 2018, on a National Academy of Sciences panel on reengineering the Census Bureau’s annual economic surveys.⁠[2][4][5]

Personal website: Public link: https://web.stanford.edu/~rehall/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]

Stanford University: Official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[14]

Hoover Institution: Official website: https://www.hoover.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

National Bureau of Economic Research: Official website: https://www.nber.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]