This is a summary of remarks and interviews published elsewhere. Links are at the end.

Robert Hall, 83, shares the 2026 economics prize with Columbia's Michael Woodford. In a statement released through the Hoover Institution and reported by The Stanford Daily, he called the award "a wonderful surprise".

Thanks, in an unusual order

Hall credited Stanford's economics department and the Hoover Institution for giving him the freedom and the time to pursue his research. He thanked his wife and coauthor, Susan Woodward. And he added that he hoped California and federal taxpayers would consider the public education they paid for a worthwhile investment.

The 1978 paper

In 1978, the year he joined Stanford and Hoover, Hall published a short paper testing how households decide how much to spend. His colleague Valerie Ramey, a former research assistant, told The Stanford Daily that Hall borrowed an idea from finance: if people plan sensibly, their spending should change only when new information arrives, not in response to income they already expected.

That idea became a building block of modern macroeconomics. The paper's core equation now sits inside the New Keynesian models that central banks use to set interest rates.

The man who dates recessions

Hall also had a more public role. From its founding in 1978 until 2024, he chaired the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee, the group that decides when US recessions begin and end.

Colleagues describe a researcher who always tried to strip an idea down to its essentials, and who kept publishing new work long after his landmark papers. Hoover's John Cochrane called his approach foundational to the macroeconomics that followed.

Sources