Three Americans have won the Nobel prize for economics for developing new methods to study trends in asset markets. Americans Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller were cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for having laid the foundation of the current understanding of asset prices. The Academy said it’s hard to predict whether stock or bond prices will go up or down in the short term, but because of these men’s work, it’s possible to foresee movements over periods of three years or longer. Fama who is 74 and Hansen who is 60, teach at the University of Chicago. Shiller, who is 67, is a professor at Yale University.