Robert J. Shiller

Robert J. Shiller is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics, Department of Economics and Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, and Professor of Finance and Fellow at the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1967 and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. He has written on financial markets, financial innovation, behavioral economics, macroeconomics, real estate, and statistical methods, and on public attitudes, opinions, and moral judgments regarding markets. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen in 2013.

His 1989 book Market Volatility (MIT Press) is a mathematical and behavioral analysis of price fluctuations in speculative markets. His 1993 book Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society's Largest Economic Risks (Oxford University Press; available via subscribing libraries on Oxford Online) proposes a variety of new risk-management contracts, such as futures contracts in national incomes or securities based on real estate that would permit the management of risks to standards of living. His book Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2000; Broadway Books, 2001; 2nd edition Princeton University Press, 2005; 3rd edition Princeton University Press, 2015) is an analysis and explication of speculative bubbles, with special reference to the stock market and real estate.

His book The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2003) is an analysis of an expanding role of finance, insurance, and public finance in our future. His book Subprime Solution: How the Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It (Princeton, September 2008) offers an analysis of the housing and economic crisis and a plan of action against it. He co-authored, with George A. Akerlof, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, published in March 2009 by Princeton University Press. His book Finance and the Good Society was published in April 2012 by Princeton University Press. He wrote a second book with George Akerlof, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, published in 2015 by Princeton University Press. In 2019, his book Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events was published by Princeton University Press.

He has been research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1980, and was co-organizer of NBER workshops: on behavioral finance with Richard Thaler, 1991-2015, and on macroeconomics and individual decision making (behavioral macroeconomics) with George Akerlof, 1994-2007.

He served as Vice President of the American Economic Association for 2005; as President of the Eastern Economic Association for 2006-07; and as President of the American Economic Association for 2016.

He was co-founder of the firm Case Shiller Weiss, Inc., in 1991 with Prof. Karl Case of Wellesley College and Allan N. Weiss, his former student at the Yale School of Management. The firm was sold to Corelogic, Inc., after 2002. This firm produced the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices that have traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and are now published by Standard & Poor’s.

He was also cofounder of the firm MacroMarkets LLC in 2002, which launched “Macroshares,” representing oil and home prices, which were traded on the American Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. Since 2012, he has collaborated with Barclays Bank PLC on an array of financial indices and products.

He has been writing a regular column, “Finance in the 21st Century,” for Project Syndicate, which publishes around the world, since 2003, and “Economic View” for the New York Times since 2007.