The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, most commonly referred to as The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is the most prestigious prize that can be awarded in Economics. Every year the Laureates in Economics are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, based in Stockholm, Sweden. It is based on a donation given by the Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) to the Nobel Foundation in 1968, on the occasion of the bank’s 300th anniversary.
As for The Nobel Prize, that have been awarded since 1901, the criterion followed to select the winners is to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”.
The first economists to be awarded this prize were the Dutch and Norwegian economists Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch in 1969 “for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes”
1970: Paul A. Samuelson “for the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science”
1971: Simon Kuznets “for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development”
1972: John R. Hicks and Kenneth J. Arrow “for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory”
1973: Wassily Leontief “for the development of the input-output method and for its application to important economic problems”
1974: Gunnar Myrdal and Friedrich August von Hayek “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena”
1975: Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich and Tjalling C. Koopmans “for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources”
1976: Milton Friedman “for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy”
1977: Bertil Ohlin and James E. Meade “for their path breaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements”
1978: Herbert A. Simon “for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations”
1979: Theodore W. Schultz and Sir Arthur Lewis “for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries”
1980: Lawrence R. Klein “for the creation of econometric models and the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies”
1981: James Tobin “for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices”
1982: George J. Stigler “for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation”
1983: Gerard Debreu “for having incorporated new analytical methods into economic theory and for his rigorous reformulation of the theory of general equilibrium”
1984: 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”
1985: Franco Modigliani “for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets”
1986: James M. Buchanan Jr. “for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making”
1987: Robert M. Solow “for his contributions to the theory of economic growth”
1988: Maurice Allais “for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources”
1989: Trygve Haavelmo “for his clarification of the probability theory foundations of econometrics and his analyses of simultaneous economic structures”
1990: Harry M. Markowitz, Merton H. Miller and William F. Sharpe “for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics”
1991: Ronald H. Coase “for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy”
1992: Gary S. Becker “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour”
1993: Robert W. Fogel and Douglass C. North “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change”
1994: John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash Jr. and Reinhard Selten “for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games”
1995: Robert E. Lucas Jr. “for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy”
1996: James A. Mirrlees and William Vickrey “for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information”
1997: Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes “for a new method to determine the value of derivatives”
1998: Amartya Sen “for his contributions to welfare economics”
1999: Robert A. Mundell “for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas”
2000: James J. Heckman “for his development of theory and methods for analyzing selective samples”. And Daniel L. McFadden “for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice”
2001: George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz “for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information”
2002: Daniel Kahneman “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty“. And Vernon L. Smith “for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms”
2003: Robert F. Engle III “for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH)”. And Clive W.J. Granger “for methods of analyzing economic time series with common trends (cointegration)”
2004: Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott “for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles”
2005: Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling “for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis”
2006: Edmund S. Phelps “for his analysis of intertemporal trade-offs in macroeconomic policy”
2007: Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory”
2008: Paul Krugman “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity”
2009: Elinor Ostrom “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”. And Oliver E. Williamson “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm”
2010: Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides “for their analysis of markets with search frictions”
2011: Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims “for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy”
2012: Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design”
2013: Eugene F. Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert J. Shiller “for their empirical analysis of asset prices”
2014: Jean Tirole “for his analysis of market power and regulation”
2015: Angus Deaton “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare”.
2016: Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström “for their contributions to contract theory”.