Nobel Memorial Prize in economics awarded to Robert E Hall and Michael Woodford

The Nobel Prize in economics has gone to (AP)

The Nobel Memorial Prize in economics has been awarded to Robert E Hall and Michael Woodford by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

The final award in this year’s Nobel cycle, it was awarded to the Americans for their work on the “microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation”.

Last year, three researchers who study business innovation won for explaining how new products and inventions promote economic growth and human welfare, even as they leave older companies in the dust.

The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.

Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, but it is always presented together with the others on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

Nobel honours were announced last week in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about £906,000), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organisation.