Canadian economist Peter Howitt, who is among a group of three researchers to win this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, said he found out about the prize from a persistent Swedish reporter who called his wife’s phone early in the morning, even before the committee could reach him.

“It’s just the dream of a lifetime come true,” he said when reached early Monday. “We didn’t have any champagne in the fridge in anticipation of this.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday that Howitt, along with Dutch-born Joel Mokyr and Philippe Aghion of France, received the prize for “having explained innovation-driven economic growth.”

Howitt and Aghion relied on mathematics to explain how creative destruction works, a key concept in economics that refers to the process in whi

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