Årets nobelpriskandidater – vem vinner ekonomipriset 2013?; Who wins the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2013?
3 oktober, 2013
Summary in English
It is, as usual, hard to predict this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in economics (formally:”The Riksbank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”). There are around 200-300 serious candidates. The method should be to identify certain research areas that are – or should be – on the “waiting list” for the Prize and then to find some outstanding pioneers in these fields. The guess has to be done in this order. In the past four years out of five, I got all names right by using this method (which certainly does not rule out that I may be wrong this year). Betting odds usually do not serve as an appropriate guideline. Last year, my usual approach did not work. I got wrong because a similar research area was awarded as late as in 2007. At that occasion, I felt quite surprised that last year’s co-winner Alvin Roth was not among the winners.
Areas that could be interesting this year are particularly growth and development theory from both the macroeconomic and the microeconomic angle, business cycle research and private consumption – but also theory of firms, theory of incentives, and still some parts of finance and – as always – certain important macro- and microeconomic methodological and econometrical breakthroughs; particularly growth and development can be analyzed with both macroeconomic and microeconomic approaches. Microeconomic experimental research is clearly gaining momentum. And I would not rule out economic research topics with interdisciplinary links to psychology, politics, sociology, law and regulations, the environment and health – despite the recognition of sociology and economics four years ago.
Most of text of this article is in Swedish – but there are headlines in English above the four specific tables with my own main candidates (at the end of this paper). Most candidates come again from the U.S. From there, Paul Romer, Robert Barro, Elhanan Helpman, Gene Grossman, Jerry Hausman, Lars Peter Hansen, Kevin Murphy, Robert Hall, Oliver Hart, Anne Krueger and Robert Shiller are my favorite candidates. If the award goes to Europe, Jean Tirole (Toulouse) should be the most given candidate, and Alberto Alesina and Richard Blundell his main European challengers. From Asia – Israel excluded – I see again Avinash Dixit as the main candidate and Jagdish Bhagwati/Partha Dasgupta as his main challengers.
Totally, I present four lists of personally favored candidates: a very narrow one (page 7, 10 candidates), a relatively narrow one (page 7, around 20 candidates) and a broader one (page 9-10, around 40 candidates, among them 15 with strictly neutral probability preferences). 10 joint combinations of names and areas (page 8 ) are taken up as a quite new approach – but analysts of my tables should concentrate more on the three other lists.