A Columbus City Schools graduate is a Nobel Prize winner and he said some of his teachers helped point the way to college for him.
Michael Woodford graduated from Walnut Ridge High School in 1973. Woodford and Robert E. Hall were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, which was announced earlier this month.
During an interview with WOSU earlier this week, Woodford said that in high school he was interested in physics.
Woodford, now a Columbia University professor, said his teachers at Walnut Ridge helped him fuel his ambition to work on research.
"Some of my teachers there at Walnut Ridge put me in touch with university faculty at OSU, and I was able to start talking to them already," Woodford said.
Woodford said that opportunity was tremendously stimulating for him.
Woodford attended Ohio State for just one year before transferring to the University of Chicago.
According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prize, the models Woodford and Hall created through their research, "allows us to explain and quantify how stabilization policy affects business cycles and are now used by central banks and finance ministries around the world."
"Robert E. Hall's and Michael Woodford's research has made us better equipped to manage economic downturns," the academy said.
Their research created models that can help policymakers stabilize the economy, where the models are built on "microfoundations," which means from the bottom up.
Much of that has to do with the day-to-day decisions people make that affect the overall economy.
Woodford said some of the research was understanding the role of people's expectations about the future.
"In fact, when you think about the individual decisions that underlie the macroeconomic phenomena, most of those decisions are about things that by their nature require people making the decisions to think about the future," Woodford said. "What determines how much people are saving as opposed to spending now out of their incomes, what amount firms are investing in new productive capacity."
"When people in aggregate make those decisions, then they are affecting what happens in the economy as a whole so individuals aren't thinking about what effect do I want to have on the economy, they're just asking do I think can I afford the new car right now or not," Woodford said.
The academy said that using these models, rather than looking at the economy from a macro or bird's-eye view, the research by Woodford and Hall, of Stanford University, has generated a shift in the theory of stabilization policy.
Woodford is now the John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University. He received his bachelor of arts degree from the University of Chicago, his law degree from Yale Law School and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In a statement, Columbus City Schools' Superintendent Angela Chapman said:
"Columbus City Schools is committed to growing student leaders, and offer our proud congratulations to Professor Michael Woodford for earning the 2026 Nobel Prize for economics. We hope he inspires our current generation of students to go forth and do big things."
