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STOCKHOLM (AP) — Three researchers who probed the process of business innovation won the Nobel memorial prize in economics Monday for explaining how new products and inventions promote economic growth and human welfare, even as they leave older companies in the dust.

Their work was credited with helping economists better understand how ideas and technology succeed by disrupting established ways — a process as old as steam locomotives replacing horse-drawn wagons and as contemporary as e-commerce shuttering shopping malls.

The award was shared by Dutch-born Joel Mokyr, 79, who is at Northwestern University; Philippe Aghion, 69, who works at the Collège de France and the London School of Economics; and Canadian-born Peter Howitt, 79, who is at Brown University.

The winners were credited with better explaining and quantifying “creative destruction,” a key concept in economics that refers to the process in which beneficial new innovations replace — and thus destroy — older technologies and businesses.

The concept is usually associated with economist Joseph Schumpeter, who outlined it in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.” Schumpeter called the concept “the essential fact about capitalism.”

The Nobel committee said Mokyr “demonstrated that if innovations are to succeed one another in a self-generating process, we not only need to know that something works, but we also need to have scientific explanations for why.”

Aghion and Howitt studied the mechanisms behind sustained growth, including in a 1992 article that offered a complex mathematical model for creative destruction that added new aspects not included in earlier models.

Examples of creative destruction include e-commerce disrupting retail, streaming services replacing videocassette and DVD rentals and internet advertising undermining newspaper advertising. A classic illustration is horse-cart whip makers put out of business by the automobile.

“The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted. We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation,” said John Hassler, chair of the committee for the prize in economic sciences.

Howitt and Aghion’s model showed that markets with too few dominant companies can hinder innovation and growth — a concern that has been raised about industries such as telecommunications, social media platforms and airlines.

They found it was important to support people who are affected by changes while making it easy to move to more productive workplaces — to protect workers more than specific jobs. They also stressed the importance of social mobility, where a person’s profession or trade is not defined by their parents’ identity.

Mokyr has long been known as an optimist about technological innovation. About a decade ago, many economists took a more pessimistic view, arguing that inventions such as smartphones or even the internet had less of an economic impact than previous developments such as the airplane or the car.

Mokyr responded that because many new services were either cheap or free, their impact wasn’t evident in economic data, but they still provided enormous benefits.

In an interview with The Associated Press in 2015, he cited the music streaming service Spotify as an example of an “absolutely astonishing” innovation that economists had difficulty measuring. Mokyr noted he once owned more than 1,000 CDs and, before that, “I spent a large amount of my graduate student budget on vinyl records.” But now he could access a huge music library for a small monthly fee.

Mokyr, whose work stresses the need to be open to innovation and change, acknowledged that the disruption from new inventions often caused at least short-term job loss or reduced earnings for workers. Like many economists, he argued that the innovations also created new, unexpected jobs that offered fresh opportunities.

The Nobel committee noted that for much of human history, economic stagnation, rather than growth, was the norm. Starting with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, however, European and later other economies began to grow steadily.

Innovation — and how to foster it — is an urgent question in Europe, where a report by former European Central Bank head Mario Draghi argued that Europe faces a rising productivity gap with the U.S. in digital technology. Aghion said the challenge was for Europe to keep pace with the U.S. and China in innovation by promoting promote research and the venture capital financing to turn ideas into businesses.

The new tariffs, or import taxes, from U.S. President Donald Trump are “not good news for growth” but can be “a wake-up call for Europe,” he told AP. “We have to wake up. Because you know who will win in this competition? Those who innovate.”

Mokyr was still trying to get his morning coffee when he was reached by an AP reporter. He said he was shocked to win the prize.

“People always say this, but in this case I am being truthful — I had no clue that anything like this was going to happen,” he said.

His students had asked him about the possibility he would win the Nobel, he said. “I told them that I was more likely to be elected pope than to win the Nobel prize in economics — and I am Jewish, by the way.”

Mokyr will turn 80 next summer but said he has no plans to retire. “This is the type of job that I dreamed about my entire life,” he said.

He then hung up to go walk his dog.

One half of the 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million) prize goes to Mokyr, and the other half is shared by Aghion and Howitt. Winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a diploma.

The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.

Since then, it has been awarded 57 times to a total of 99 laureates. Only three of the winners have been women.

Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, but it is always presented together with the others on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

Nobel honors were announced last week in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

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McHugh reported from Frankfurt, Germany. Rugaber reported from Washington and Corder from The Hague, Netherlands. John Leicester and Oleg Cetinic in Paris contributed to this report.

NEW YORK (AP) — And back up goes Wall Street. U.S. stocks are rallying Monday after President Donald Trump said “ it will all be fine,” just days after he sent the market reeling by threatening much higher tariffs on China.

The S&P 500 jumped 1.6% to recover more than half its drop from Friday, which was its worst since April. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 598 points, or 1.3%, as of 1:25 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 2.1% higher.

“Don’t worry about China,” Trump said on his social media platform Sunday. He also said that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, “doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!!”

It was a sharp turnaround from the anger Trump displayed on Friday, when he accused China of “ a moral disgrace in dealing with other Nations."

He pointed to “an extremely hostile letter” from China describing curbs to exports of rare earths, which are materials used in the manufacturing of everything from personal electronics to jet engines. Trump said at the time that he may place an additional 100% tax on imports from China starting on Nov. 1.

For its part, China urged the United States to resolve differences through negotiations instead of threats. “We do not want a tariff war but we are not afraid of one,” the Commerce Ministry said in a statement posted online.

Hours later, Trump posted his less confrontational talk about China on Truth Social. The backtrack in anger, which also came before trading began on Wall Street, raised hopes that the world’s two largest economies could find a working relationship that allows global trade to continue.

The big moves for the market bracketing the weekend echo its manic swings in April. That’s when Trump shocked investors with his “Liberation Day” announcement of worldwide tariffs, only to eventually relent on many to give time to negotiate trade deals with other countries.

If this time ends up similarly, potentially even after a sharp drop for stock prices, subsiding trade tensions and uncertainty could allow for a rolling recovery to continue into 2026, according to Morgan Stanley strategists led by Michael Wilson.

To be sure, the U.S. stock market may have been primed for a drop and was perhaps just looking for a potential trigger. It was already facing criticism that prices had shot too high following a nearly relentless 35% run for the S&P 500 from a low in April. The index, which dictates the movements for many 401(k) accounts, is still near its all-time high set last week.

Not only did Trump’s backdown from tariffs help launch stock prices since April, so did expectations for several cuts to interest rates by the Federal Reserve to help the economy.

Critics say the market looks too expensive now after prices rose much faster than corporate profits. Worries are particularly high about companies in the artificial-intelligence industry, where pessimists hear echoes of the 2000 dot-com bubble that imploded.

Broadcom jumped 9.9% for Monday’s biggest gain in the S&P 500 after announcing a collaboration with OpenAI. The maker of ChatGPT will design custom AI accelerators, and Broadcom will help develop and deploy them.

For stocks broadly to look less expensive, either prices need to fall, or companies’ profits need to rise.

That’s raising the stakes for the upcoming earnings reporting season, with big U.S. companies lining up to say how much profit they made during the summer. JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson and United Airlines are some of the big names on the calendar this upcoming week.

Fastenal tumbled 5.3% after the maker of fasteners and safety supplies reported a profit for the latest quarter that was slightly weaker than analysts expected.

At Bank of America, strategist Savita Subramanian is optimistic that companies across the S&P 500 can deliver a bigger overall profit than analysts expected. Besides reports showing a resilient U.S. economy, she also pointed in a BofA Global Research report to how the U.S. dollar’s weakening against other currencies boosts the value of sales made abroad by big U.S. companies.

In stock markets abroad, indexes edged higher in Europe following losses in Asia, which had their first opportunity to react to Trump’s threat from Friday of additional tariffs on China.

Stocks fell 1.5% in Hong Kong and 0.2% in Shanghai.

China reported its global exports rose 8.3% in September from a year earlier, the strongest growth in six months and further evidence that its manufacturers are shifting sales from the United States to other markets.

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AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV encouraged international news agencies on Thursday to stand firm as a bulwark against the “ancient art of lying” and manipulation, as he strongly backed a free, independent and objective press.

History’s first American pope called for imprisoned journalists to be released and said the work of journalists must never be considered a crime. Rather, journalism is a right and a pillar upholding “the edifice of our societies” that must be protected and defended, he said.

“If today we know what is happening in Gaza, Ukraine and every other land bloodied by bombs, we largely owe it to them,” Leo said of journalists. “These extraordinary eyewitness accounts are the culmination of the daily efforts of countless people who work to ensure that information is not manipulated for ends that are contrary to truth and human dignity. “

Leo’s comments came in a speech to executives of international news agencies belonging to MINDS International, a consortium of leading agencies including The Associated Press.

In his five months as pope, the Chicago-born Leo has spoken out strongly on the need to protect freedom of expression and the rights of journalists. In his first meeting with reporters right after his election, Leo called for the release of imprisoned journalists and affirmed the “precious gift of free speech and the press.”

More recently, he insisted that journalism was “not only an act of justice, but a duty of all those who long for a solid and participatory democracy.” In a letter to a crusading Peruvian journalist repeatedly sued for her work, Leo affirmed the freedom of the press was an “inalienable common good.”

On Thursday, he strongly encouraged news agencies amid a double crisis they are facing, with economic pressures threatening their survival and consumers increasingly unable to distinguish truth from lies.

“I urge you: Never sell out your authority!” Leo said.

He quoted Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in asserting that the world needs free and objective information. He cited her warning that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

Leo said even with the challenges posed today by artificial intelligence, news agencies must stand firm.

“With your patient and rigorous work, you can act as a barrier against those who, through the ancient art of lying, seek to create divisions in order to rule by dividing,” he said. ”You can also be a bulwark of civility against the quicksand of approximation and post-truth.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House budget office said Friday that mass firings of federal workers have started in an attempt to exert more pressure on Democratic lawmakers in the ongoing government shutdown.

Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on the social media site X that the “RIFs have begun,” referring to reduction-in-force plans aimed at reducing the size of the federal government.

A spokesperson for the budget office said the reductions are “substantial” but did not offer more immediate details.

The Education Department is among the agencies hit by new layoffs, a department spokesperson said Friday without providing more details. The department had about 4,100 employees when Trump took office in January, but its workforce was nearly halved amid mass layoffs in the Republican administration’s first months. At the start of the shutdown, it had about 2,500 employees.

Federal health workers were also being fired Friday, though a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman did not say how many or which agencies were being hit hardest. And an official for the American Federation of Government Employees, who is suing the Trump administration over the firings, said in a legal filing Friday that the Treasury Department is set to issue layoff notices to 1,300 employees.

Notices of firings have also taken place at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which leads federal efforts to reduce risk to the nation’s cyber and physical infrastructure, according to a person familiar with the actions who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss them.

The White House previewed that it would pursue the aggressive layoff tactic shortly before the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, telling all federal agencies to submit their reduction-in-force plans to the budget office for its review. It said reduction-in-force plans could apply to federal programs whose funding would lapse in a government shutdown, are otherwise not funded and are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

This goes far beyond what usually happens in a government shutdown, which is that federal workers are furloughed but restored to their jobs once the shutdown ends.

Democrats have tried to call the administration’s bluff, arguing the firings could be illegal, and seemed bolstered by the fact that the White House had yet to carry out the firings.

But President Donald Trump said earlier this week that he would soon have more information about how many federal jobs would be eliminated.

“I’ll be able to tell you that in four or five days if this keeps going on,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office as he met with Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney. “If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back.”

The AFGE, a labor union for federal employees, asked a federal judge Friday for a restraining order to halt the firings, calling the action an abuse of power designed to punish workers and pressure Congress.

“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” said the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, in a statement.

Meanwhile, the halls of the Capitol were quiet on Friday, the 10th day of the shutdown, with both the House and the Senate out of Washington and both sides digging in for a protracted shutdown fight. Senate Republicans have tried repeatedly to cajole Democratic holdouts to vote for a stopgap bill to reopen the government, but Democrats have refused as they hold out for a firm commitment to extend health care benefits.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have suggested that Vought’s threats of mass layoffs have been unhelpful to bipartisan talks on the funding standoff.

The top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, said in a statement that the “shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers” to lay off workers.

“This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks,” she added.

The top Senate Democrat, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, said the blame for the layoffs rested with Trump.

“Let’s be blunt: nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said. “They don’t have to do it; they want to. They’re callously choosing to hurt people—the workers who protect our country, inspect our food, respond when disasters strike. This is deliberate chaos.”

Still, there was no sign that the top Democratic and Republican Senate leaders were even talking about a way to solve the impasse. Instead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune continued to try to peel away centrist Democrats who may be willing to cross party lines as the shutdown pain dragged on.

“It’s time for them to get a backbone,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said during a news conference.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that tracks federal service, says that more than 200,000 civil servants have left since the start of this administration in January due to earlier firings, retirements and deferred resignation offers.

“These unnecessary and misguided reductions in force will further hollow out our federal government, rob it of critical expertise and hobble its capacity to effectively serve the public,” said the organization’s president and CEO, Max Stier.

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AP Education Writer Collin Binkley and AP writers Kevin Freking and Mike Stobbe contributed to this report.

OSLO, Norway (AP) — The awarding Friday of the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado brought this week’s Nobel announcements to a conclusion. Only the economics prize remains, to be awarded Monday.

The peace prize is the only Nobel awarded in Oslo, Norway. The others are awarded in Stockholm. The award ceremony will be held on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel who founded the prizes.

Here are this year’s winners so far:

On Oct. 6, the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to three scientists for their work on the immune system.

Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi uncovered a key pathway the body uses to keep the immune system in check, viewed as critical to understanding autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

In separate projects, the trio identified the importance of what are now called regulatory T cells. Scientists are using those findings in a variety of ways: to discover better treatments for autoimmune diseases, to improve organ transplant success and to enhance the body’s own fight against cancer, among others.

Brunkow, 64, is now a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Ramsdell, 64, is a scientific adviser for San Francisco-based Sonoma Biotherapeutics. Sakaguchi, 74, is a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan.

On Oct. 7, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to another trio of scientists for their research on the “weirdness” of subatomic particles called quantum tunneling. That has enabled the ultrasensitive measurements achieved by MRI machines and laid the groundwork for better cellphones and faster computers.

The work by John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis took the seeming contradictions of the subatomic world — where light can be both a wave and a particle, and parts of atoms can tunnel through seemingly impenetrable barriers — and applied them in the more traditional physics of digital devices. The results of their findings are just starting to appear in advanced technology and could pave the way for the development of supercharged computing.

Clarke, 83, conducted his research at the University of California, Berkeley; Martinis, 67, at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Devoret, 72, is at Yale and also at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Clarke spearheaded the project.

On Oct. 8, another scientific trio won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their development of new molecular structures that can trap vast quantities of gas inside. Experts say the work lays the groundwork to potentially suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere or harvest moisture from desert environments.

Experts say the work of Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges.”

Kitagawa, 74, is with Japan’s Kyoto University, while Robson, 88, is affiliated with the University of Melbourne in Australia. Yaghi, 60, is with the University of California, Berkeley.

On Oct. 9, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for work the judges said upholds the power of art in the midst of “apocalyptic terror.” His surreal and anarchic novels combine a bleak world view with mordant humor.

Krasznahorkai, 71, has written more than 20 books, including “The Melancholy of Resistance,” a surreal, disturbing tale involving a traveling circus and a stuffed whale, and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” the sprawling saga of a gambling-addicted aristocrat.

Krasznahorkai has been a vocal critic of autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, especially his government’s lack of support for Ukraine after Russia launched an all-out war.

On Oct. 10, Machado of Venezuela won the Nobel Peace Prize, and was lauded for being a “key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided.”

Machado, who turned 58 this week, was set to run against Maduro in last year’s presidential election, but the government disqualified her. The lead-up to the election saw widespread repression, including disqualifications, arrests and human rights violations. Maduro’s government has routinely targeted its real or perceived opponents.

Machado went into hiding and hasn’t been seen in public since January, and as a result it’s unclear whether she will attend the awards ceremony in Stockholm in December.

Machado becomes the 20th woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, of the 112 individuals who have been honored.