William Nordhaus
William Nordhaus is a Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics at Yale University. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received his BA from Yale University in 1963 and his PhD in economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018 “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis.” He lives in New Haven with his wife, Barbara Nordhaus.
Professor Nordhaus served on the faculty of Yale University from 1967 until his retirement in 2024. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He served as president of the American Economic Association in 2015–2016.
From 1977 to 1979, he was a member of President Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 1986 to 1988, he was the provost of Yale University. He was chair of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank from 2013 to 2015. He has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences on topics including climate change, environmental accounting, risk, economic data, and the role of the tax system in climate change.
Professor Nordhaus’s research included wage and price behavior, health economics, augmented national accounting, the political business cycle, and productivity. He is the author of numerous articles including “Is Growth Obsolete?” (with James Tobin) and books such as Warming the World, The Climate Casino, and (with Paul Samuelson) the classic textbook Economics, now in its nineteenth edition. His most recent book is The Spirit of Green (Princeton University Press, 2021).
His most recent work focuses on the economics of climate change, developing models that integrate the science, economics, and policies necessary to slow warming. These studies include the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) and Regional Dynamic General-Equilibrium (RICE) models of the economics of climate change, which have been widely used in research on studies of climate-change economics and policies. Among his most important contributions is developing approaches to estimate the appropriate emissions price for greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methods which are now used to price CO2 in more than sixty countries.