Paul Romer is an American economist who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Economics for his contributions to the understanding of long-term economic growth and its relation to technological innovation. Romer studied mathematics and physics at the University of Chicago, earning a B.S. degree in 1977. After graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Queens University (Ontario, Canada), he received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1983. He later taught at the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and the New York University Stern School of Business. In 2000 he founded Aplia, Inc., an online learning company. From 2016 to 2018 he served as chief economist of the World Bank.

Romer is the author of many important scholarly papers, including “Endogenous Technological Change” (1990), which first outlined the theory of endogenous growth.