William D. Nordhaus
Facts
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William D. Nordhaus
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2018
Born: 31 May 1941, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Prize motivation: “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis”
Prize share: 1/2
Life
William Nordhaus was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the United States. He studied at Yale University and completed his PhD in 1967 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been associated with Yale University since 1967 and a professor there since 1973. He has been a member of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity since 1972, and from 1977 to 1979 he was an economic advisor to President Jimmy Carter’s administration.
Work
At its heart, economics deals with the management of scarce resources. Nature dictates the main constraints on economic growth and our knowledge determines how well we deal with these constraints. William Nordhaus’ findings deal with interactions between society, the economy and climate change. In the mid-1990s, he created a quantitative model that describes the global interplay between the economy and the climate. Nordhaus’ model is used to examine the consequences of climate policy interventions, for example carbon taxes.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
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