Robert M. Solow Won 1987 Nobel Prize for Analyzing Economic Growth

Robert M. Solow, a member of the NBER Board of Directors, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1987 for creating what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described as “a theoretical framework which can be used in discussing the factors which lie behind economic growth in both quantitative and theoretical terms … [and] to measure empirically the contributions made by various production factors in economic growth.”

Solow quantified the key role of technological progress in contributing to growth, showing that aggregated technological, educational, and skill-related changes, as distinct from population increases and capital investment, had generated roughly 80 percent of US growth. To describe this aggregation of factors, he coined the term “total factor productivity.”

At the time of the award, Solow was Institute Professor at MIT.

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