Who wins the Nobel Prize? - How Fair Is the Nobel? - influence of government policy on choice of winners for the Nobel Price in economics

Challenge, March-April, 1999 by Johan van Gompel

Table 2

Nobel Laureates by Country and University

Country                                          Number of laureates

United States(*)                                          26
United Kingdom(*)                                          8
Norway                                                     2
Sweden                                                     2
Russia                                                     1
Canada                                                     1
Germany                                                    1
France                                                     1
The Netherlands                                            1
India                                                      1

University with more than one laureate           Number of laureates

Chicago                                                    8
Harvard                                                    4
Cambridge                                                  4
MIT                                                        3
Stockholm                                                  2
Oslo                                                       2
Yale                                                       2
Princeton                                                  2
Berkeley                                                   2
Stanford                                                   2

* Arthur Lewis possessed both U.S. and British citizenship.

The Academy has twice awarded the prize to be shared among three economists and nine times between two economists. Although making the award simultaneously to totally independent work is a possibility, the shared prizes relate almost exclusively to work that is closely interconnected. The work of the first laureates, Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen, for example, was very closely interrelated. That of Tjalling Koopmans and Leonid Kantorovich was produced independently, even though it belongs to the same discipline. The Academy could also have combined differently the economists awarded the prize so far. In particular, this refers to the Samuelson-Hicks, Arrow-Debreu, and Modigliani-Miller combinations. Taking into account the relatively recent establishment of the economics prize, a shared prize in economics has occurred less frequently than in the case of the natural sciences, but more frequently than in the cases of the literature and peace prizes. A possible explanation is that original contributions in economic science, compared to those in the natural sciences and especially in medicine, are more often the result of individual research. This might change in the future, since in specialist economics literature more and more articles are jointly authored. However, it is still too soon to attribute the renewed award of shared prizes in the 1990s, after the exclusively single-person prizes of the 1980s, to this type of authorship.

Although the contributions cannot always be classified unequivocally as either macroeconomics or microeconomics, the predominance of macroeconomics in the Nobel Prize awards emerges clearly. Roughly two-thirds of the work relates to macroeconomics, which deals with the study of economic aggregates (such as production, consumption, and investment), and one-third to microeconomics, which investigates the economic behavior of individuals (including consumers and producers). A rough breakdown according to the nature of the work (see Table 3) shows that the majority of the research took place in restricted fields. The prize also was often for interdisciplinary work, which indicates that the academy gives a broad interpretation to the field of economics. For instance, formal and mathematical methods played a major role in the work of John Hicks, Kenneth Arrow, Tjalling Koopmans, Leonid Kantorovich, Gerard Debreu, John Nash, John Harsanyi, and Reinhard Selten. Ragner Frisch, Jan Tinbergen, Lawrence Klein, and Trygve Haavelmo paid a great deal of attention to econometrics, which combines economics with statistics. The work of Ronald Coase, which has ground in common with law, and that of Robert Fogel and Douglass North, which relates to scientific historiography, are other examples of interdisciplinary work.