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16 October 2007
Sveriges Riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne 2007
The winners of the 2007 Economics prize were announced yesterday in Stockholm; the award will go to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." Not quite as well known as this year's Peace prize winner, but big names in the world of economic theory. Marginal Revolution has much more detail on the winners and their work (here, here, and elsewhere). I don't have much to add, other than a few comments on why I'm blogging this on a statistics blog.
I think it's fair to say that the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in honor of Alfred Nobel (yes, that's more or less the official name) is the most visible award in the social sciences. The prize has occasionally been awarded to econometricians (Engle and Granger in 2003, Heckman and McFadden in 2000, Haavelmo in 1989, and Klein in 1980), but it is striking how rare it is for econometrics (or, for that matter, empirical work in economics) to be recognized by the prize committee. This is not true of other fields. To get a sense of the discrepancy, compare economics with physics, a discipline not known for being particularly atheoretical. Each award carries with it a citation recognizing the work for which the prize was given. If we look at the ratio of citations with the word "theory" to those with the word "discovery", in economics the ratio is 19 to 1 (and the one "discovery" is the Coase Theorem), while in physics the ratio is more like 1 to 3.8. I think this reflects the productive interplay between theory and empirics in physics, and the lack of a similar dynamic in economics (and social science generally). It will be interesting to see when and if the current movement toward behavioral economics will be recognized by the selection committee.
Posted by Mike Kellermann at October 16, 2007 1:15 PM
Comments
What about Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics? He was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2002. The co-winner that year was Vernon Smith, specifically for his work in empirical economic analysis using experiments.
Posted by: Rob Hyndman at October 16, 2007 6:52 PM
The 2002 prize is one of the few examples, along with the 1984 prize to Sir Richard Stone "for having made fundamental contributions to the development of systems of national accounts and hence greatly improved the basis for empirical economic analysis." They are not primarily econometricians, so I didn't include them in the list, but it doesn't really change the story much in my opinion.
Posted by: Mike Kellermann at October 16, 2007 9:31 PM
One other point, though , which the Kahneman Nobel suggests is that given the lag time associated with awarding these prizes it will take a decade or two before the new empiricist bent in economics is recognized by the Nobel committee; surveying the existing prize winners is clearly a backward-looking indicator.
Posted by: Mike Kellermann at October 16, 2007 9:35 PM