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Nobel Prize in Economics: A history of winners
It's best known as the Nobel Prize for Economics, but the official name of the award handed out today for the 44th time is The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Since 1969 it has been awarded 44 times to 71 lauriates.
Americans Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley took home the 2012 prize. Roth is now at Stanford - and was at Harvard when he did his prize-winning work. (We spoke with Roth in an interview on the Marketplace Morning Report). Shapley is a professor emeritus at UCLA. The Nobel committee honored the two economists today for their work in "the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."
Here are a list of past winners:
2011: Thomas J. Sargent, Christopher A. Sims took home the 2011 award in Economics for their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy"
2010: The award went to Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen, Christopher A. Pissarides for their "analysis of markets with search frictions".
2009: Elinor Ostrom, Oliver E. Williamson
Elinor Ostrom won "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons," and Oliver E. Williamson "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm."
2008: Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman was cited "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity."
2007: Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, Roger B. Myerson
All three received the award "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory."
2006: Edmund Phelps
Edward Phelps won the award "for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy."
2005: Robert J. Aumann, Thomas C. Schelling
Both won for "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis."
More past winners:
2004 - Finn E. Kydland, Edward C. Prescott
2003 - Robert F. Engle III, Clive W.J. Granger
2002 - Daniel Kahneman, Vernon L. Smith
2001 - George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence, Joseph E. Stiglitz
2000 - James J. Heckman, Daniel L. McFadden
1999 - Robert A. Mundell
1998 - Amartya Sen
1997 - Robert C. Merton, Myron S. Scholes
1996 - James A. Mirrlees, William Vickrey
1995 - Robert E. Lucas Jr.
1994 - John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash Jr., Reinhard Selten
1993 - Robert W. Fogel, Douglass C. North
1992 - Gary S. Becker
1991 - Ronald H. Coase
1990 - Harry M. Markowitz, Merton H. Miller, William F. Sharpe
1989 - Trygve Haavelmo
1988 - Maurice Allais
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1986 - James M. Buchanan Jr.
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1984 - Richard Stone
1983 - Gerard Debreu
1982 - George J. Stigler
1981 - James Tobin
1980- Lawrence R. Klein
1979 - Theodore W. Schultz, Sir Arthur Lewis
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1977 - Bertil Ohlin, James E. Meade
1976 - Milton Friedman
1975 - Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich, Tjalling C. Koopmans
1974 - Gunnar Myrdal, Friedrich August von Hayek
1973 - Wassily Leontief
1972 - John R. Hicks, Kenneth J. Arrow
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1970 - Paul A. Samuelson
1969 - Ragnar Frisch, Jan Tinbergen
All photos and quoted text from © The Nobel Foundation
I love the nominations! Let's keep 'em coming... and it puts me in a mood to add my own extreme dark-horse candidate:
In the course of my recent econ education, I took one course where I distinctly remember thinking the work (to my relatively novice brain, anyway) felt Nobel-worthy. John Nyman is a health care economist at the University of Minnesota who took the established knowledge about why people get health insurance, and why health insurance markets don't "work," and then politely -- and largely single-handedly --eviscerated it with his own elegant and much more useful (for policy) theory.
It's iconoclastic stuff, and it takes time to change years of the economic thinking that essentially led to blaming patients for "overusing" healthcare (and the natural policy responses, some of which -- like managed care -- have come and gone). But Nyman's take, by applying prospect theory, makes more intuitive sense, and suggests answers for fixing the health care system that line up well with what practice has shown in other parts of the world. I'd like to think someday it'll be recognized for redirecting a budding field of economics with direct bearing on human well-being.
Of course, I was in the class. But still... :-)
I would like to nominate Harry Markopolos. All the analysts, PHDs, regulators, and investors couldn’t figure this one out, so Mr. Markopolos must be way ahead of them all. It is one thing to have theories, it is another to be proven correct when all the others are wrong.
Armen Alchian (UCLA) is long over due, but I would also recommend Israel Kirzner (NYU) and both could win for their contributions to our understanding of market theory and the price system. Their work respectively explains economic forces as work --- Alchian the omnipresent force of competition and Kirzner the entrepreneurial element in human action.
Others I hope are considered would be Harold Demsetz (UCLA) for fundamental contributions to property rights and the economics of organization, and Gordon Tullock (GMU) for the economic analysis of politics and law, and in particular rent-seeking.
Certainly Kirzner for his work on entrepreneurship. But I would also like to see someone involved in complexity economics get it as a signal that such work is necessary and valuable.
George Magnus.
In 2007, Mr. Magnus predicted in March that the US sub prime mortgage finance crisis
would become a Minsky Moment – or a full-blown credit crunch, named after the US
economist Hyman Minsky – and he has written a series of illuminating research papers
to highlight the nature and consequences of the crisis, and now, the economic
aftermath.
In October 2008, Mr. Magnus’ book – The Age of Aging – a study of how
demographics are changing the world and what the economic and social implications
might be, as well as those for globalization, religion in the world, immigration and
global security – was published by John Wiley in Asia, Europe and North America. His
current book, Uprising: will emerging markets shape or shake the world economy?,
examines controversially the prospects for emerging markets and the BRICs, in
particular, in the wake of the financial crisis. It is due to be published in the UK in
October, and in the US and elsewhere in December.
