Former Ohio State Faculty Won Nobel Prize in Economics
Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics along with Joel Mokyr and Phillippe Aghion, his longtime collaborator. The department extends its warmest congratulations to Professor Howitt on the remarkable achievement and is deeply honored to have played a role in his academic journey. He held the University Chaired Professorship in Economics at Ohio State from 1996 to 2000. During his tenure, he made a lasting contribution to the department through teaching, research, and graduate student mentoring. At Ohio State, he also served as editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, the macroeconomics journal of the department. Prior to joining the department, he was on the faculty of the University of Western Ontario from 1972 to 1996. He left for Brown University in 2000, where he continued his work until his retirement in 2013. Over his distinguished career, he has been recognized as Fellow of the Econometric Society, President of the Canadian Economic Association, and recipient of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award.
The department joins the profession in celebrating the pioneering idea of creative destruction. When a new and better product enters the market, the companies selling the older products lose out. The innovative company represents something new and is thus creative. It is also destructive because the companies whose technology becomes obsolete are replaced. While there are always winners and losers at any time, the economy grows in a sustained fashion. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences credited Professor Howitt and Phillippe Aghion for this explanation of innovation-driven economic growth. Explaining the impact of the discovery, the Academy wrote, “The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken as granted. We must uphold the mechanisms that underly creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation.” Professor Howitt has shared that the idea of creative destruction was first conceived in 1987, during his visit to MIT, where he met Aghion. The first article on the idea was published in Econometrica in 1992. He continued to expand on this work during his time at both Ohio State and Brown. A prolific scholar, Professor Howitt’s contributions span a wide range of fields, including business cycle theory, the history of economic thought, political economy, and the Canadian economy.