LAKE TERNBY, Minn. — Robert E. Hall of Stanford University and Michael Woodford of Columbia University won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm. The Academy cited their work “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.” The award is 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million, and is shared equally between the two laureates.
A third recipient was named in Lake Ternby, Minn., by a folding chair.
Gary Tunstall, 61, a retired parts manager, has kept the chair beside the kitchen wall phone since Sunday night. He said he had been watching it closely since the announcement, and that it had not moved except once, to be dusted.
“The chair has been sitting by that phone since Sunday night,” Tunstall said. “It would be strange if nobody noticed.”
Tunstall said the chair had sat through the physics announcement, the chemistry announcement and the literature announcement without complaint, which he described as “the kind of patience you don’t see in people anymore.” He said he did not know whether the Academy had considered furniture, but that it should have.
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said the prize rules are silent on seating. “There is nothing in the statutes about chairs,” Achterberg said. “Historically, the Academy has not had to consider the question. It is a loophole, and I have been waiting for someone to use it.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said by phone that the chair’s position was obvious to anyone who had spent time around a kitchen. “It is a chair, and it is by the phone,” Brickhouse said. “Those are the two facts. Everything else is committee business.”
Tunstall said he had reviewed the chair’s contributions with the same care he gives his own, and that it had been present for every day of Nobel week, which he counted as a form of research. He said he had also asked the chair whether it had any published work. It had not answered, which Tunstall considered consistent with his own track record.
Under the arrangement Tunstall described, the chair would receive one third of the prize, and the two economists would divide the remaining two thirds. Tunstall said he would hold the chair’s share in the kitchen drawer until the chair files its taxes.
“I’m not asking for anything I’m not entitled to,” he said. “I’m just the one who pays attention to the chair.”
Bev Tunstall said she had not been consulted about the chair’s share and had set a second folding chair beside the first, in case the committee called while everyone was in the bathroom.
The chair declined to comment.