Sterling Professor of Economics
William Nordhaus completed his undergraduate work at Yale University in 1963 and received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been on the faculty of Yale University since 1967 and has been Full Professor of Economics since 1973.
From 1977 to 1979, Norhaus was a Member of President Carter's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1986 to 1988, he served as the Provost of Yale University. He was Chair of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank for 2013-2015. He has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences on topics including climate change, environmental accounting, risk, and the role of the tax system in climate change.
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."