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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