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Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

(Redirected from Nobel Prize in Economics)

The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (Swe. Sveriges Riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), often colloquially called The Nobel Prize in Economics or The Nobel Prize for Economics, is different from the rest of prizes awarded at the Nobel Prize ceremony in that it is not part of the Alfred Nobel bequest. It was instituted by the Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank) at its 300th anniversity in 1969.

Award process

The prize is, like the prizes in Chemistry and Physics, decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and is awarded alongside the other prizes in the sciences. Nominations of about one hundred living persons are made each year by qualifying nominators and are received by a five to eight member committee, which then submits a reward proposal to the Nobel Assembly, which then votes on the candidates (up to 3). The final award is made in Stockholm, and is accompanied by a prize (10 million Kroner, or roughly 1 million euros as of 2004).

Controversy

Members of the Nobel family contest the use of the term "Nobel Prize in Economics" in any context. Peter Nobel claims that the Bank of Sweden has "infringed on the trademarked name of Nobel. Two-thirds of the bank’s prizes in economics have gone to US economists of the Chicago School, who create mathematical models to speculate in stock markets and options - the very opposite of the purposes of Alfred Nobel, to improve the human condition.”

Controversy stems from a few areas:

1. Its affiliation with the Nobel name despite its not being a true Nobel Prize.
2. A perceived bias toward neoliberal economics.
3. That economics is a social science, making objective evaluation of candidates more difficult.
4. A perception that the most influential economists were awarded the prize in the 70's and early 80's, and that since then the available candidates in the field have been weaker and hence more controversial.

Winners

List of Prize Winners from 1969 to the present day.


1960s - 1970s - 1980s - 1990s - 2000s

1960s

Year Name Topics
1969 Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch, Jan Tinbergen for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes

1970s

Year Name Topics
1970 Paul Samuelson for the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science
1971 Simon Kuznets for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development
1972 John Hicks, Kenneth Arrow for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory
1973 Wassily Leontief for the development of the input-output method and for its application to important economic problems.
1974 Gunnar Myrdal, Friedrich Hayek for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena
1975 Leonid Kantorovich, Tjalling Koopmans for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources
1976 Milton Friedman for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.
1977 Bertil Ohlin, James Meade for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements
1978 Herbert Simon for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations
1979 Theodore Schultz, Arthur Lewis for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries

1980s

Year Name Topics
1980 Lawrence Klein for the creation of econometric models and the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies
1981 James Tobin for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices
1982 George Stigler for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation
1983 Gerard Debreu for having incorporated new analytical methods into economic theory and for his rigorous reformulation of the theory of general equilibrium
1984 Richard Stone for having made fundamental contributions to the development of systems of national accounts and hence greatly improved the basis for empirical economic analysis
1985 Franco Modigliani for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets
1986 James Buchanan Jr for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making
1987 Robert Solow for his contributions to the theory of economic growth
1988 Maurice Allais for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources
1989 Trygve Haavelmo for his clarification of the probability theory foundations of econometrics and his analyses of simultaneous economic structures

1990s

Year Name Topics
1990 Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller, William Sharpe for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics
1991 Ronald Coase for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy
1992 Gary Becker for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour
1993 Robert Fogel, Douglass North for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change
1994 Reinhard Selten, John Forbes Nash, John Harsanyi for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games
1995 Robert Lucas Jr for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy
1996 James Mirrlees, William Vickrey for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information
1997 Robert Merton, Myron Scholes for a new method to determine the value of derivatives
1998 Amartya Sen for his contributions to welfare economics
1999 Robert Mundell for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas

2000s

Year Name Topics
2000 James Heckman,
Daniel McFadden
for his development of theory and methods for analyzing selective samples
for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice
2001 George A. Akerlof, Michael Spence, Joseph E. Stiglitz for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.
2002 Daniel Kahneman,

Vernon L. Smith
for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty
for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms
2003 Robert F. Engle, Clive W. J. Granger for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility or common trends
2004 Finn E. Kydland, Edward C. Prescott for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles

External links

Last updated: 05-23-2005 10:05:37