Today, Senior Fellow Robert Hall is awarded the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences; John Cochrane explains the significance of this prize award and Hall’s contributions to macroeconomics; and Peter Berkowitz lays out why, in his view, the United States will either “conserve liberty and virtue together or lose both.”
Economics
Senior Fellow, Emeritus, Robert E. Hall was named today as one of two recipients of the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Hall was recognized with this highest honor in economics for his contributions to the “microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization,” alongside economist Michael Woodford. “Bob Hall is one of the most distinguished economists of his generation, whose work has profoundly shaped our understanding of economic growth, employment, and the forces that drive the American economy,” said Director Condoleezza Rice. His “creative and impactful work illuminates the connections between how households and firms behave and the outcomes of the economy as a whole,” said Stanford President Jonathan Levin. During his distinguished career, Hall has been an active proponent of a flat tax and served as an advisor to President-elect Ronald Reagan, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, and the Federal Reserve Board.
Hall’s receipt of the 2026 Nobel Prize extends a distinguished tradition of economics scholarship at the Hoover Institution, including past prize-winners Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, Douglass North, George Stigler, Thomas Sargent, and Michael Spence. Read more here.
Senior Fellow John H. Cochrane celebrates the recipients of the 2026 Nobel Prize in economics, writing, “This is a great prize, honoring two superb and highly influential economists.” Cochrane says that Robert Hall’s best-known paper “was a brilliant extension and test of Milton Friedman’s permanent income model of consumption, which undercut the whole Keynesian fiscal stimulus business. Hall’s approach is also the cornerstone of all subsequent macroeconomics.” More personally, Cochrane shares that Hall “has also been a great colleague here at Hoover. For example, he asked a crucial question while walking back from a seminar that sent me on the whole s-shaped surplus quest that makes fiscal theory work.” Cochrane writes that the award came as a bit of a surprise, given Hall’s range of interests as a scholar, but that he is “glad to be wrong” about whether Hall would receive this well-deserved recognition. Read more here.
Political Philosophy
At RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz zooms out from the present political focus on the midterm elections to articulate how “restoring a shared appreciation of the nation’s founding dedication to blending liberty and virtue” would help to sustain the American republic. “Combining liberty and virtue may seem like mixing water and oil because liberty, which involves doing as you please, frequently conflicts with virtue, or acting as you ought,” Berkowitz writes. But liberty and virtue actually depend on one another, he explains: “Liberty without self-restraint, toleration, civility, generosity, and other moral virtues deteriorates into sloth or decadence; virtue without liberty . . . turns inward and curdles as arbitrary authority severs virtue’s connection to judgment, choice, and action.” Against arguments from the “new right,” the essay makes the case that sacrificing liberty to “save virtue” amounts to a “dubious proposition.” Read more here.
European Security and Defense
“Vladimir Putin is escalating both his full-scale war against Ukraine and his shadow war against the rest of Europe,” Senior Fellow Timothy Garton Ash writes in an opinion column for The Guardian. Putin’s “main purpose in the shadow [war] is to break European support for Ukraine so he can subjugate that country, something he regards as existential for Russia’s future and his own,” Garton Ash explains. The historian says that Putin believes he can break the will of European democracies—leading him to argue that now is precisely the time Europe should double down on its support for its beleaguered Ukrainian neighbor. Mustering the political will to do so will prove a challenge in nations like Germany and France, writes Garton Ash, but he sees ample moral reasons and defensive self-interest for European states to continue their support for Kyiv. Read more here.
Immigration
Mapping where H-1B work is based and which employers file for it, a Data Brief from the Hoover Immigration Initiative shows how the visa program is concentrated in a handful of states, metro areas, and companies. Fifty percent of the H-1B work is based in four states: California, Texas, New Jersey, and New York. The biggest applicants file by the thousands, the explainer notes. The 10 largest employers took 17.5% of all approved petitions, while 82% of employers won fewer than five. Read more here.
Demography and Economics
For the first time in human history, the world’s population is falling, due to declining birth rates in rich and poor countries alike. Economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde joins EconTalk to speak with Visiting Fellow Russ Roberts about why falling fertility has accelerated sharply over the past decade and why it defies easy explanation.
The Big Idea: As the scholars discuss, declining religiosity, increased use of smartphones and social media, soaring housing costs, and changing gender norms are popular, but unconfirmed, theories of the decline in births. Fernández-Villaverde offers his own speculative answer: that modern life makes a third child costly and childlessness easy. The episode also explores how shrinking economies make public debt harder to service, and how fewer births mean fewer scientists, artists, and inventors. Watch or listen here.
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