Peter Howitt

Early Years and Education

Peter Howitt attended Victory Public School and Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute. By his own account he was not a very good student, but a family friend encouraged him to study. In an exchange with the author, Peter Howitt shared:

“As a teenager I was influenced by Carl Winger, who owned a wool brokerage in Guelph and had taken me under his wing. He had given me an after-school and weekend job in his company and I was fascinated by the price changes being reported from all over the world on his teletype machine. He told me if I wanted to understand this, I should study economics.”

Howitt went to McGill University, where he majored in economics and political science. He received his BA (Honours) in economics in 1968. In 1969, he earned his MA in economics at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University). He studied under Robert W. Clower at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and was awarded his PhD in economics in 1973 for his thesis titled “Studies in the Theory of Monetary Dynamics.”

Academic Career

Peter Howitt taught at the University of Western Ontario as an assistant professor from 1972 to 1977, as an associate professor until 1981, and as a professor until 1996. While there he was the Bank of Montreal professor of money and finance. During these years, he was a visiting professor at Hebrew University (1980), the Université Laval (1985), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1988), the Université Paris 1 (1989) and the Université de Toulouse (1995–96). From 1996 to 2000, he was a member of the faculty at The Ohio State University. In 2000, Howitt went to Brown University, where he was a professor of economics and of social sciences until 2012. Since 2013, he has been professor emeritus of economics and social sciences at Brown, and since 2015, honorary professor of economics at Western University.

In addition to his teaching career, Howitt has also participated in various economic and research policy organizations. He served as president of the Canadian Economics Association from 1993 to 1994 and was an associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research from 1994 to 2002. As an institute fellow-in-residence and international fellow he has contributed to the C.D. Howe Institute for more than 25 years. He is also affiliated with international research organizations, such as CESifo and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Research Highlights

Endogenous Growth Theory and Creative Destruction

Peter Howitt met and began collaborating with the French economist Philippe Aghion while at MIT. They began exploring theories of economic growth, such as the concept of endogenous growth, which asserts that economic growth is driven by forces within the economy itself. Howitt and Aghion discussed endogenous growth in their co-authored published works.

Creative destruction, which was conceptualized by the Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, is the process by which old technologies are replaced by new ones as a fundamental system of innovation and economic growth. Howitt, in collaboration with Aghion, developed the Schumpeterian model and mathematically formalized the process. Their research opened doors in the study of macroeconomic fluctuations, unemployment and an understanding of sustained economic growth. Howitt’s own research has examined how factors such as finance, education and competition affect technological progress. The model Howitt helped create provides a valuable guide for policies beneficial to development subsidies and the establishment of safety nets for workers whose livelihoods are affected by creative destruction. His work is also significant in the evolution of antitrust and competition law as the international economic order faces the changes and conflicts brought on by the expansion of artificial intelligence.

“The idea [is] that economic growth is driven by technological progress. Technological progress comes from new inventions and innovations that open up all sorts of possibility to make us all more productive, but at the same time as it produces these great benefits for most of society, it also generates a lot of harm for certain people whose human capital or physical capital is rendered obsolete by these new ideas.” – Peter Howitt

Nobel Prize

In 2025, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences jointly awarded Peter Howitt and Philippe Aghion half of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction. (See also Nobel Prizes and Canada.) The other half was awarded to American-Israeli economist and historian Joel Mokyr. The Academy stated in its news release: “Over the last two centuries, for the first time in history, the world has seen sustained economic growth. This has lifted vast numbers of people out of poverty and laid the foundation of our prosperity. This year’s laureates in economic sciences, Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, explain how innovation provides the impetus for further progress.”

During the presentation of the prize in Stockholm, economics professor Kerstin Enflo of Lund University stated: “From it [Howitt and Aghion’s work] we can derive the average growth rate as the result of a multitude of decisions made by individuals facing conflicting interests.”

Editorial and Publishing History

Peter Howitt has published or contributed to numerous works throughout his career. He was editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking from 1997 to 2000. He has been associate editor of the Canadian Journal of Economics (1978–81), Econometrica (1995–98), the Journal of Economic Growth (1996–present), Macroeconomic Dynamics (1997–2001), and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (2006–11). Between 1973 and 2018, Howitt authored or co-authored 141 articles on economics and related topics in Canadian, American and European journals. He is author or co-author of several books: Monetary Policy in Transition: A Study of Bank of Canada Policy, 1982–85 (1986), The Keynesian Recovery and Other Essays (1990), Endogenous Growth Theory (with Philippe Aghion,1998), and The Economics of Growth (with Philippe Aghion, 2009). He edited The Implications of Knowledge-Based Growth for Micro-Economic Policies (1996) and Money, Markets and Method: Essays in Honour of Robert W. Clower (with Elisabetta de Antoni and Axel Leijonhufvud, 1999). He has also reviewed numerous scholarly books on economics.

Honours and Awards

• Fellow, Royal Society of Canada (1992)
• Fellow, Econometric Society (1994)
• Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Guelph (2009)
• Honorary Doctor of Letters, Wilfrid Laurier University (2016)
• Honorary Senior Fellow of the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis (2018)
• Frontiers of Knowledge Award – Economics, Finance and Management category, BBVA Foundation (2020)
• Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2025)