A very rational award

摘要

If the credit boom and bust of the past decade taught economists anything, it was that asset prices matter. So it is right and proper that three academics who have worked on the difficult issue of understanding why such prices move have won this year's Nobel prize for economics (see Free exchange). At first sight, it may seem odd that Eugene Fama (pictured left), a Chicago professor who believes in efficient markets, should share the award with Robert Shiller (centre), a Yale academic who argued that the stockmarket in the late 1990s and American house prices in the early 2000s were driven by "irrational exuberance". (The third winner, Lars Peter Hansen, on the right, also of Chicago, developed statistical techniques to analyse asset prices.) But there is more common ground than meets the eye.