Årets nobelpriskandidater – vem vinner ekonomipriset 2010?; Who wins the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2010?
4 oktober, 2010
Summary
It is, as usual, hard to predict the next winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. The method should be to identify certain research areas that are – or should be – on the “waiting list” and then to find some outstanding pioneers in these fields. The guess has to be done in this order.
Areas that could be interesting this year are particularly labor market issues and growth theory but also global topics, theory of firms, theory of incentives, and still some parts of finance – and as always – certain important macro- and microeconomic methodological and econometrical/statistical breakthroughs. However, I would not rule out economic research topics with interdisciplinary links to psychology, politics, law/regulations – despite the recognition of sociology last year.
Most text of this article is written in Swedish – but foreign readers will be provided with headlines in English above the two specific tables with my own favorite candidates (at the end of this paper). Most candidates come again from the U.S. From there, Dale Mortensen, Paul Romer, Robert Barro, Helpman/Grossman, Peter Diamond, Kevin Murphy and Robert Shiller are my own favorite candidates. If the award goes to Europe, the French economist Jean Tirole (Toulouse) should be the most probable candidate. And I continue to plead for Assar Lindbeck as a very good candidate. Lars Peter Hansen may be the most prominent outsider candidate. From Asia, I consider Avinash Dixit as the main candidate. Dixit should be among the “top 5” candidates.
Totally, I present two lists of personally favored candidates, a more narrow one (page 6, 20 candidates) and a broader one (page 8, around 40 candidates). We will have to see whether the forthcoming Nobel Prize winner(s) more belongs (belong) to the group of economists with important scientific breakthroughs or to the group of researchers that are linked to more current topics. The first group has been dominating so far. The second group, however, has been gaining some momentum in recent years. But this still can be random.