Peter Howitt is a professor emeritus at Brown University. He and French economist Philippe Aghion were jointly awarded half of the Nobel Prize for their work on modelling the ‘creative destruction’ that fuels economic growth.

It was a prompt and persistent Swedish reporter who alerted Peter Howitt to the fact that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Economics, before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences managed to reach him with the news.

The Canadian economist turned off his phone when he went to bed on Sunday night, but a reporter got through to his wife’s number right after the announcement in Sweden on Monday morning. Prof. Howitt was completely caught off guard, without a bottle of champagne in the house.

“I’m just thrilled,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail from his home

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