Shiller wins economics Nobel for 'bubble' warnings

Robert Shiller, who became famous for calling the housing and internet stock bubbles, was one of three Americans to win the Nobel in economics.

Shiller is a professor at Yale University. He is joined by Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen, who teach at the University of Chicago.

The award was for their work on the pricing of financial assets. Together they concluded that predicting the price of stocks and bonds in the short term is virtually impossible. But they showed it is possible to forecast the broad course of prices over longer periods, such as three to five years.

Shiller was among those who warned in the 1990s that the run-up in stock prices as part of the internet stock bubble was the result of "irrational exuberance."

Last decade, Shiller made similar warnings about the run-up in US home prices. That proved to be correct when the housing bubble burst and plunged the nation into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

He helped to develop the S and P - Case-Shiller home price index, which is one of the most closely watched measures of home values. Shiller said economists are still drawing lessons from the bursting of the housing bubble.

"I think there's much more to be done. I think it will take decades," Shiller said. "But we've been through financial crises many times in our history and we've generally learned from them."

Fama and Hansen are not as well known as Shiller outside the field of economics. Hansen developed a statistical method that was well suited to testing theories of asset pricing, the committee said.

CNN