US economists Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, announced the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences here on Monday.

The three won the award "for their empirical analysis of asset prices," said the academy.

They have found that although there is no way to predict the price of stocks and bonds over the next few days or weeks, it is quite possible to foresee the broad course of these prices over longer periods, such as three or five years, it said.

Fama and Hansen are affiliated with the University of Chicago, while Shiller is a professor at Yale University.

Starting in the 1960s, Fama and his collaborators demonstrated that stock prices are extremely difficult to predict in the short run and new information is very quickly incorporated into market prices, the academy said.

In the 1980s, Shiller found that "stock prices fluctuate much more than corporate dividends, and that the ratio of prices to dividends tends to fall when it is high, and to increase when it is low."

Hansen's contribution is the statistical method to test the rational theories of assets pricing.

The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the last of the six prizes announced this year.

All Nobel prizes, except the economics award, were established in the will of the Swedish millionaire. The economics award was established by Sweden's central bank in 1968.