Baltic Business Research

(without updating in 2022)

It is hard to predict the winner(s) 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. In the past 21 years, I predicted 25 out of totally 40 winners (62 %), mainly by checking out the research areas that deserved the award and by then trying to find the most outstanding researchers in those areas.

Like in the past years, I do not mainly focus on the most probable forecasts for the leading candidates. I concentrate instead again on summing up a number of economists who now would deserve the award according to my own view – and there are lots of further names just outside my list. I conclude that there should be room for courageous prize decisions – again when it comes to gender but also to the ethnical and geographical background. For time reasons, I keep all my lists from 2021 almost unchanged. No new names were added in 2022. 2021 was my final “guestimate” but there is still a good chance that this year’s Nobel laureate(s) can be found in my old list of candidates from 2021.

My preferred 5 female candidates were in 2021 and remain in 2022 (without ranking): Susan Athey (Stanford), Marianne Bertrand (Chicago), Janet Currie (Princeton), Claudia Goldin (Harvard) and Anne Krueger (Johns Hopkins University).

I also used in 2021 21 candidates from 2017 who in 2022 still should have a probability of around 10 percent to be among this year’s winner(s) and 14 new names compared to 2017, replacing 9 suggested economists who got the prize in the past four years and 6 professors who passed away during 2018-2021/2022. Unfortunately, one more outstanding professor passed away in June 2022 (Dale Jorgenson). Furthermore, I publish a list from 2017 with one later amendment what I call “courageous choices”.

Research areas that should be focused on in 2021/2022 are still according to my preference,in this order:

¤ labor market economics/the welfare state,
¤ banking and financial markets (not so much monetary policy),
¤ politics, law, the environment, health, sociology, gender issues – all with links to economics,
¤ links between microeconomics and macroeconomics, statistical methods and econometrics.                                                        

My own favorites in 2021 / 2022 (without considering probability) are / were again female candidates – with Claudia Goldin, Janet Currie and Marianne Bertrand in the lead. But I also like Daron Acemoglu, Joshua Angrist, Richard Blundell, Kevin Murphy, Jagdish Bhagwati or Mark Granovetter to make it.

Read the full article here, Nobel Candidates 2022

Hubert Fromlet