Robert Engle of the United States and Britain’s Clive Granger have won this year’s Nobel prize in economics. The economists won the award for their use of statistical methods for analyzing economic data, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

“This year’s Laureates devised new statistical methods for dealing with two key properties of many economic time series,” the academy said in its citation for the prize, worth about $1.3 million.

Engle, born in 1942 in Syracuse, N.Y., teaches at New York University.

Granger, born in 1934 in Wales, is a professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego.

The economics award was instituted by Sweden’s central bank in 1968 and first awarded in 1969.