Baltic Business Research

Summary 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 years, I got almost all names right by using this method (which certainly does not rule out that I may be wrong this year). Last year, I did not prepare any updated list of candidates for pure time reasons.

Areas that could be interesting this year are again growth/development theory and labor market economics from both the macroeconomic and the microeconomic angle, international trade and business cycle research – but also micro areas like the theory of firms, entrepreneurship, human capital formation, innovation and certain important macro- and microeconomic methodological and econometrical breakthroughs. Microeconomic experimental research clearly continues to gain momentum. And I would not rule out economic research topics with interdisciplinary links to, for example, politics, sociology, behavior, law and regulations, the environment and health. Direct business and management research – (“företagsekonomisk forskning”) is never on any forecasting list – but may show up some day. This angle of research is covered by the official term “economic sciences”; but related topics such as organization, corporate governance, ethics, incentives and banking are/have been parked on my list for years.

Most of the text of this article is in Swedish – but there are headlines in English above the five specific tables with my own main candidates (in the beginning of this paper). Most candidates still come from the U.S. From there, Robert Barro, William Baumol, Olivier Blanchard, Douglas Diamond, Oliver Hart, Jerry Hausman, David Kreps, Anne Krueger, Edward Lazear, Charles Manski, Kevin Murphy, Stephen Ross, Ariel Rubinstein and Nancy Stokey are my top candidates. Paul Romer is listed there as well – but I took him away from the very first place – right or wrong – due to his new function in the governmental organization of the World Bank. He remains, however, a top favorite. If the award goes to another European economist, Alberto Alesina, Anthony Atkinson, Richard Blundell, Vincent Crawford, David Hendry and Bengt Holmström should be the main challengers (without forgetting that some of the names mentioned above have or have had academic positions both in the U.S. and Europe). From Asia – Israel excluded – I see Avinash Dixit as the main candidate, Jagdish Bhagwati/Partha Dasgupta as his main Asian challengers and Hashem Pesaran and Nobuhiro Kiyotaki as the main outsiders.

My 5 top candidates: Robert Barro, Douglas Diamond, Philippe Aghion, Avinash Dixit and Paul Romer.

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