It is now a week since the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it would ask Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller to share this year’s prize for economics in memory of Alfred Nobel. At first, many wondered if the Swedish dignitaries had a strange sense of humour. The two are known for taking opposite sides on whether markets are efficient.
But a more practical question might be: “What does it mean to say that markets are efficient or inefficient, and in any case what can we do about it?”
The two economists shared the award with Lars Hanson of the University of Chicago, whose work in econometrics has not aroused the same public controversy.