Nobel Economics prize goes to 3 U.S. scholars

U.S. scholars Eugene F. Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert J. Shiller on Monday won the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.

The three experts were honored “for their empirical analysis of asset prices.”

“There is no way to predict the price of stocks and bonds over the next few days or weeks. But it is quite possible to foresee the broad course of these prices over longer periods, such as the next three to five years,” the academy said.

“These findings, which might seem both surprising and contradictory, were made and analyzed by this year’s laureates, Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller,” the announcement said.

Fama, born in 1939, and Hansen, born in 1952, are both affiliated with the University of Chicago.

Shiller, born in Detroit in 1946, is an economics professor at Yale University.

The recipients of what is officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2013 will share 8 million kronor ($1.2 million).

“The laureates have laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices. It relies in part on fluctuations in risk and risk attitudes, and in part on behavioral biases and market frictions,” the academy said.