Wharton School welcomes nine new faculty members, including Thomas Sargent, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, who returns as the Rowan Distinguished Professor of Finance. Sargent expresses enthusiasm for collaborating with students and faculty, emphasizing the rewards of research in economics.

The Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan has appointed Catherine Hausman as its inaugural Lenore K. and Robert Damrauer Professor, a new position focused on energy economics and environmental policy.

David Vaillant has been appointed as Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of the World Bank Group, bringing over two decades of experience in finance from BNP Paribas. 

It’s probably intuitive that macroeconomic forces must be derived, at least in part, from the actions of the billions of people and firms that contribute to the economy every day. But making precise links between the observed macroeconomy and the individual actions of specific agents is very difficult. Fortunately, for a huge array of practical purposes, economists are able to model and study macro-level trends like inflation without needing to know how they come about from the actions of underlying agents.But when someone does try to explain macroeconomic phenomena by building up from microeconomics, economists often call it macroeconomics with a “microeconomic foundation”. This has been a practice for decades, but it’s still an active area of research and debate, and it’s partly what earned the 2026 Economics Nobel Prize winners their award.