Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (Swe. Sveriges Riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), eroneously called The Nobel Prize in Economics or The Nobel Prize for Economics, is different from the rest of prizes awarded at the Nobel Prize ceremony in that it is not part of the Alfred Nobel bequest. It was instituted by the Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank) at its 300th anniversary in 1969.

Award process

The prize is, like the prizes in Chemistry and Physics, decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and is awarded alongside the other prizes in the sciences. Nominations of about one hundred living persons are made each year by qualifying nominators and are received by a five to eight member committee, which then submits a reward proposal to the Nobel Assembly, which then votes on the candidates (up to 3). The final award is made in Stockholm, and is accompanied by a prize (10 million Kronor, or roughly 1 million euros as of 2004).

Controversy

Controversy stems from a few areas:

1. Its affiliation with the Nobel name despite not being part of Alfred Nobel's bequest.

2. A perceived bias toward neoliberal economics.

3. That economics is a social science, making objective evaluation of candidates more difficult.

4. A perception that the most influential economists were awarded the prize in the 70's and early 80's, and that since then the available candidates in the field have been weaker and hence more controversial.

Among the most vocal critics of the economics prize is Peter Nobel who is a member of the Nobel family -- his paternal grandfather's grandmother was one of the daughters of Alfred Nobel's elder brother Ludvig.

Winners

List of Prize Winners from 1969 to the present day.

1960s - 1970s - 1980s - 1990s - 2000s

1960s

Year	Name	Topics
1969	Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch, Jan Tinbergen	for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes

1970s

Year	Name	Topics
1970	Paul 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 Hicks, Kenneth 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, Friedrich 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 Kantorovich, Tjalling 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, James Meade	for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements
1978	Herbert Simon	for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations
1979	Theodore Schultz, Arthur Lewis	for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries

1980s

Year	Name	Topics
1980	Lawrence 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 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 Buchanan Jr	for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making
1987	Robert 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

1990s

Year	Name	Topics
1990	Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller, William Sharpe	for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics
1991	Ronald 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 Becker	for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour
1993	Robert Fogel, Douglass North	for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change
1994	Reinhard Selten, John Forbes Nash, John Harsanyi	for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games
1995	Robert 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 Mirrlees, William Vickrey	for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information
1997	Robert Merton, Myron Scholes	for a new method to determine the value of derivatives
1998	Amartya Sen	for his contributions to welfare economics
1999	Robert Mundell	for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas

2000s

Year	Name	Topics
2000	James Heckman, Daniel McFadden	for his development of theory and methods for analyzing selective samples for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice
2001	George A. Akerlof, Michael Spence, Joseph E. Stiglitz	for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.
2002	Daniel Kahneman, Vernon L. Smith	for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms
2003	Robert F. Engle, Clive W. J. Granger	for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility or common trends
2004	Finn E. Kydland, Edward C. Prescott	for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles

External links

Laureates (http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/index.html) at the Nobel foundation
Winners of the Prize in Economics (http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/economics)
History of the prize and its controversy (http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/nobel.htm)
A critique of a perceived bias of the prize toward the Chicago School (http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-chinobel.htm)