[33] Four of his PhD students, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Diamond, and William Nordhaus, later received Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences in their own right.

[37][39] Shortly after returning, he proceeded to marry his girlfriend, Barbara Lewis (died 2014), whom he had been dating for six weeks.

[37] In 1949, just before going off to Columbia, he was offered and accepted an assistant professorship in the Economics Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Solow also held several government positions, including senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers (1961–62) and member of the President's Commission on Income Maintenance (1968–70).

In 1961 he won the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Award, given to the best economist under age forty.

In 1987, he won the Nobel Prize for his analysis of economic growth[37] and in 1999, he received the National Medal of Science.

After the death of his colleague Franco Modigliani, Solow accepted an appointment as new Chairman of the I.S.E.O Institute, an Italian nonprofit cultural association which organizes international conferences and summer schools.

[45] The idea lay dormant for some time perhaps because Dale W. Jorgenson (1966) argued that it was observationally equivalent with disembodied technological progress, as advanced earlier in Solow (1957).

It was successfully advanced in subsequent research by Jeremy Greenwood, Zvi Hercowitz and Per Krusell (1997), who argued that the secular decline in capital goods prices could be used to measure embodied technological progress.

Both Paul Romer and Robert Lucas, Jr. subsequently developed alternatives to Solow's neoclassical growth model.

The point where the two lines meet is known as the steady state level, which means that the nation is producing just enough to be able to replace the old capital.

Today, economists use Solow's sources-of-growth accounting to estimate the separate effects on economic growth of technological change, capital, and labor.