The Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics – in common usage: Nobel Prize for Economics – goes this year to three American economists. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored the Canadian David Card from the University of California at Berkeley for his empirical research on labor economics. The award also goes to the two Americans Joshua D. Angrist (Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge) and Guido W. Imbens (Stanford University), “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”. As in the previous year, the prizes are endowed with ten million Swedish kronor (around 980,000 euros) per category.
The Nobel Prize for Economics, which has been awarded since the late 1960s, is the only one that does not go back to the will of the prize sponsor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). It was donated by the Swedish Reichsbank and is therefore not, strictly speaking, a classic Nobel Prize. Nevertheless, it will be presented together with the other prizes on the anniversary of Nobel’s death, December 10th.
According to tradition, scientists from the USA are among the favorites for the award. Last year it went to the US economists Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson, who were honored for their improvements in auction theory and the invention of new auction formats. So far, only one German has been among the Nobel laureates in economics: the Bonn scientist Reinhard Selten received it in 1994 together with John Nash and John Harsanyi for their groundbreaking contributions to non-cooperative game theory.
Editor’s note: In a previous version, David Card was referred to as an American. He does research at the University of California at Berkeley, but was born in Canada.