Passage 17
Americans Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller won the Nobel Prize for economics on Monday for developing methods to study trends in stock, bond and housing markets. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that through their research, the three had laid the _1_ of the current understanding of asset prices and changed the way people invest.
While it’s _2_ whether stock or bond prices will go up or down in the short term, it’s possible to foresee _3_ over periods of three years or longer, the academy said. “These findings, which might seem surprising and contradictory, were _4_ made and analyzed by this year’s prize winners,” the academy said.
Fama, 74, and Hansen, 60, are _5_ with the University of Chicago. Shiller, 67, is a professor at Yale University. Starting in the 1960s, Fama and others showed how difficult it is to predict individual stock prices in the short run. His findings _6_ the practice of investing, leading to the emergence of index funds. Two decades later, Shiller showed that there is more predictability in the long run in stock and bond markets, while Hansen developed a _7_ method to test theories of asset pricing. “These are three _8_ different kinds of people and the thing that unites them all is asset pricing," says David Warsh, who tracks academic economists on his Economic Principals blog.
The economics award is not a Nobel Prize in the same sense as the medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and peace prizes, which were _9_ by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in 1895. Sweden’s central bank added the economics prize in 1968 as a _10_ to Nobel.
A) unpredictable B) foundation C) supplementary D) utterly
E) fellowship F) movements G) illuminates H) memorial
I) inaugurated J) separately K) created L) statistical
M) associated N) cooperatively O) revolutionized