William Dawbney Nordhaus is an American economist and Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, best known for his work in economic modelling and climate change.
He is one of the laureates of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Nordhaus received the prize "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis".
He studied at Yale University and completed his PhD in 1967 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been associated with Yale University since 1967 and a professor there since 1973. He has been a member of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity since 1972, and from 1977 to 1979 he was an economic advisor to President Jimmy Carter’s administration.
William Nordhaus’ findings deal with interactions between society, the economy and climate change. In the mid-1990s, he created a quantitative model that describes the global interplay between the economy and the climate. Nordhaus’ model is used to examine the consequences of climate policy interventions, for example carbon taxes.