At the end of this year’s Nobel Prize announcements, the winners in the economics category will be announced on Monday. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm will announce who will receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics at 11:45 a.m. at the earliest. Last year, the US-based economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens were honored with the prestigious award.
The Nobel Prize winners in the categories of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were announced last week. All Nobel prizes this year are again endowed with ten million Swedish crowns – that’s currently almost 920,000 euros.
The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is the only one of the Nobel Prizes that does not go back to the testament of Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), inventor of the dynamite and founder of the prize. It has been donated by the Swedish Reichsbank since the late 1960s and is therefore, strictly speaking, not one of the classic Nobel Prizes. Nevertheless, like the other Nobel prizes, it will be ceremoniously presented on the anniversary of Nobel’s death, December 10th.
US scientists are favorites
So far, scientists from the USA have been honored with it particularly often – according to German economists, it should remain so this year. For example, the President of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Marcel Fratzscher, sees the two US economists Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff as two possible candidates.
Achim Wambach, President of the Leibniz Center for European Economic Research (ZEW), names the US professors Timothy Bresnahan and Michael Porter and the Israeli-American economist Ariel Pakes. Clemens Fuest, President of the Munich Ifo Institute, favors the Austrian-Swiss economist Ernst Fehr.
So far, the only Nobel Prize winner for economics from Germany has been the Bonn scientist Reinhard Selten. He shared the 1994 award with John Nash and John Harsanyi for their seminal contributions to non-cooperative game theory.
