Paul Romer

Paul Romer is University Professor at NYU Stern School of Business and the 2018 Nobel Laureate in Economics (shared with William Nordhaus). His development of endogenous growth theory in the late 1980s was a major departure from the Solow growth model, which treated technological progress as exogenous. Romer showed that technological change arises from intentional investment by profit-seeking agents — that ideas are non-rival economic goods (one person's use does not prevent another's) but are excludable through patents and trade secrets, creating the justification for intellectual property protection and R&D subsidies as growth policy. His "New Growth Theory" (encapsulated in his 1990 JPE paper "Endogenous Technological Change") became enormously influential in academic economics and in justifying innovation-focused policy. Romer also became known for advocating "charter cities" as a development strategy — creating new cities in developing countries governed under superior institutional frameworks. He served as Chief Economist at the World Bank from 2016 to 2018, though his tenure was controversial due to disagreements over Chile's rankings.