Robert Shiller

Yale University

Robert James Shiller is an American economist at Yale University who shared the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen for their empirical analysis of asset prices. Shiller's central contribution was demonstrating that stock prices exhibit excess volatility relative to what would be predicted by rational present-value models based on dividends — challenging the strong form of the efficient markets hypothesis. He developed the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, also called the Shiller P/E, which has become one of the most widely used valuation metrics by institutional investors and market analysts. Shiller co-created the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices with Karl Case, providing the first comprehensive, repeat-sales measure of U.S. residential real estate prices that documented and predicted the housing bubble preceding the 2008 financial crisis. He is also known for his accessible books on behavioral finance and financial bubbles, including Irrational Exuberance and Animal Spirits.