Paul M. Romer
Facts
© Nobel Media AB. Photo: A. Mahmoud
Paul M. Romer
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2018
Born: 1955, Denver, CO, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: NYU Stern School of Business, New York, NY, USA
Prize motivation: “for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis”
Prize share: 1/2
Life
Paul Romer was born in Denver, Colorado in the United States. He studied at the University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He received his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1983. He has worked at the University of Rochester, University of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. He also served as chief economist at the World Bank. Since 2011 he has been associated with New York University.
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. Paul Romer has demonstrated how knowledge can function as a driver of long-term economic growth. He showed how economic forces govern the willingness of firms to produce new ideas. Romer’s central theory, which was published in 1990, explains how ideas are different to other goods and require specific conditions to thrive in a market.
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.
See them all presented here.
