Robert J. Shiller Quote

Robert James Shiller (born March 29, 1946) is an American economist, academic, and author. As of 2022, he served as a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University and is a fellow at the Yale School of Management's International Center for Finance. Shiller has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) since 1980, was vice president of the American Economic Association in 2005, its president for 2016, and president of the Eastern Economic Association for 2006–2007. He is also the co‑founder and chief economist of the investment management firm MacroMarkets LLC.
Shiller is known for four major intellectual contributions: 1) he co-developed the Case-Shiller housing price index, which uses a statistical technique to value a house based upon recent sales prices of other houses; 2) he challenged the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EFM), using a statistical model that showed that the U.S. stock market was more volatile than it should be if the expected real return on the stock market was constant; 3) he co-developed a simple measure of valuation of the stock market, which has become widely used, the Cyclically-Adjusted Price-Earnings (CAPE), which uses the average inflation-adjusted earnings of the stock market over the last ten years to smooth out the effects of business cycles on earnings; and 4) he has sounded alarms regarding stock market and housing bubbles.
In 2003, he co-authored a Brookings Institution paper called "Is There a Bubble in the Housing Market?", and in 2005 he warned that "further rises in the [stock and housing] markets could lead, eventually, to even more significant declines... A long-run consequence could be a decline in consumer and business confidence, and another, possibly worldwide, recession." Writing in The Wall Street Journal in August 2006, Shiller again warned that "there is significant risk of a ... possible recession sooner than most of us expected.", and in September 2007, almost exactly one year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Shiller wrote an article in which he predicted an imminent collapse in the U.S. housing market, and subsequent financial panic.
Shiller was ranked by the IDEAS RePEc publications monitor in 2008 as among the 100 most influential economists of the world; and was still on the list in 2019. Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Shiller jointly received the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, "for their empirical analysis of asset prices".