Baltic Business Research

Summary

It is, as usual, hard to predict the next winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. 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” and then to find some outstanding pioneers in these fields. The guess has to be done in this order. In the past four years, 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.

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 three years ago.

Most of text of this article is in Swedish – but foreign readers can watch 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 as his main challenger.

Totally, I present four lists of personally favored candidates: a very narrow one (page 6, 10 candidates), a relatively narrow one (page 7, around 20 candidates) and a broader one (page 9, around 40 candidates, among them 15 with 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. We will have to see whether the next Nobel Prize winner(s) more belongs (belong) to the group of economists with scientific breakthroughs or to the group of researchers that are linked to more current topics like Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. The first group has been dominating so far – and will most probably continue to do so.

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