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William Nordhaus Robert Pindyck

William Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is on the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cowles Foundation for Research, and has been a member and senior advisor of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C. since 1972. Professor Nordhaus is current or past associate editor of several scientific journals.

Professor Nordhaus has studied wage and price behavior, health economics, augmented national accounting, the political business cycle, and productivity. He is the author of many books, among them Invention, Growth and Welfare, Is Growth Obsolete?, The Efficient Use of Energy Resources, Managing the Global Commons, Warming the World, and (joint with Paul Samuelson) the classic textbook, Economics, whose nineteenth edition was published in 2010. His most recent book on climate change is The Climate Casino (Yale Press, 2013).

His major work focuses on the economics of climate change, developing models that integrated the science, economics, and policies necessary to slow warming. These studies include the DICE and RICE models of the economics of climate change, which have been widely used in research on studies of climate-change economics and policies. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018 "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis."

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Robert Pindyck is the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Ltd. Professor in Finance and Economics and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Pindyck’s most recent research focuses on economic policies related to rare disasters, such as those that would severely affect the entire U.S. or world economies. Examples include possible but low-probability catastrophic outcomes from global warming or nuclear terrorism. At issue is how such low-probability but extreme outcomes should affect current policy, for example, in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. He also has continued to work on irreversible investment decisions, the role of network effects in market structure, and the behavior of commodity prices.

Pindyck is the co-author of Investment Under Uncertainty (Princeton University Press, 1994), which demonstrates that the traditional “net present value” rule for capital investment decisions can lead to wrong answers since it ignores the irreversibility of most investment decisions and the option of delaying an investment. Recently, Pindyck has extended these ideas to the timing and design of environmental policy, as well as to research and development decisions and patent valuation. His work on network effects focuses on market structure in the pharmaceutical and computer industries, while his research on commodity markets examines the random structure of long-term and short-term price evolution and the implications for hedging and investment.

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