Professor Michael Woodford, the John Bates Clark Professor Political Economy and Chair of the Department of Economics, has been awarded the 2024 Erwin Nemmers Prize in Economics. One of five-cross-disciplinary prizes awarded every other year by Northwestern University, the prestigious prize recognizes renowned leaders who have made lasting contributions to new knowledge or the development of significant new modes of analysis.
Professor Woodford received this year’s award for “advancing the New Keynesian approach to understanding economic fluctuations in general equilibrium, bridging the theory and practice of monetary policy, and incorporating bounded rationality in macroeconomics.”
A member of the Columbia University community since 2004, Professor Woodford’s research focuses on the implications of bounded rationality for economic analysis, drawing upon findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, with particular emphasis on the consequences of decisions based on imprecise mental representation. He is author of the seminal work, Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy, and several other volumes and popular textbooks. Among his scholarly awards and designations, he has been a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, and the Society for Economic Measurement. In addition to his Nemmers Prize, he was 2007 recipient of the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, and the 2018 recipient of the Banque de France/TSE Prize in Monetary Economics.
“We are thrilled Professor Woodford has been recognized with the 2024 Nemmers Prize for his work and contributions to the field of economics,” said Amy E. Hungerford, Dean and Executive Vice President of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “He is one of the brightest lights in a truly stellar group of economists at Columbia, and he carries forward a rich tradition of scholarship and impact that has expanded our understanding of how human behavior affects economic choices, and advanced the field more broadly in meaningful and lasting ways.”
Read more about the Nemmers Prize here.
