Nobel Prize in Economics winners by university 1969-2023

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was established in 1968 with an endowment from the Swedish central bank, the Riksbank. The award is administered by the Nobel Foundation, although it is not one of the Nobel Prizes, which were established in the will of Alfred Nobel. The award is chosen using the same method as the original Nobel Prizes and is awarded at the same ceremony as the prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Literature every year in Stockholm, while The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded at a different ceremony in Oslo, Norway. Well known public figures who have received the award in the past include Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago in 1976 and Paul Krugman of Princeton University in 2008.

The 2022 Prize

The winners of the prize in 2022 were Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for "research on banks and financial crises". Ben Bernanke is most well known as the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, where he oversaw the response to the Global Financial Crisis, as well as for his academic work on the causes of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and The Great Depression, which he conducted largely at Princeton. Diamond and Dybvig are the authors of a formal theoretical model, the Diamond-Dybvig model, which pioneered the modelling of bank runs and financial panics.

While the decision to award the prize to Bernanke, Diamond and Dybvig has been praised for recognizing their contributions to the theoretical and historical study of banking and its relation to financial panics, others have criticized the decision as their work is seen as ignoring the development of non-bank financial intermediaries, as well as criticizing Bernanke for his policy response to the financial crisis. Diamond is the University of Chicago's fourteenth recipient of the award, while Bernanke is Princeton's ninth and Dybvig is the Wahington University of St. Louis' second.

The 2023 Prize

The winner of the 2023 prize was Claudia Goldin of Harvard University for "having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes". Goldin is only the third woman to receieve the Sveriges Riksbank prize - Elinor Ostrom being awarded in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019 - and the first woman to receive the prize as a sole winner. Goldin is an economic historian and a labor economist by training, whose work has focused on the historical development of women's participation in the labor market and the effects, both on the economy and on wider society, that this has had. 

Goldin's career-long research into these topics was summarised in her 2019 book Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Jouney toward Equity, which pointed to the unequal pressures which women and men haved faced when building careers over the past century, as women have had to balance their professional ambitions with their traditional role in the household. Goldin is Harvard's 11th recipient of the prize and the first since Micheal Kremer was a recipient in 2019, meaning that the Cambridge, Massauchussetts, based univerity is now only three prizes behind the University of Chicago. 

The 2024 Prize

The winners of the 2024 Economics Nobel will be announced in October 2024. As with every other year, there will be intense speculation as to who will be awarded the prize. The Nobel acts as a signifier as to which sub-fields within the academic discipline of economics are most relevant to the wider world and as to which scholars have made the most cutting-edge contributions over their careers. In the past sub-fields such as Behavioral Economics (for which Richard Thaler was awarded the prize in 2017), Environmental Economics (for which William Nordhaus was awarded the prize in 2018), and the leaders of the "credibility revolution" in economics (for which Card, Angrist, and Imbens were awarded in 2021), received much wider public recognition and understanding of their findings after receiving the Nobel. 

The Nobel Committee do not release a shortlist of potential recipients, so as always we do not know who is in the running to be next year's recipient(s). From looking at past recipients and the state of current research in economics, however, we have a decent idea of candidates who are likely to win a Nobel in their career, if not in 2024. One contender who has yet to be awarded the prize is Daron Acemoglu of MIT and his co-authors, for their work on the long-run development of institutions which facilitate or hinder economic growth. Other likely nominations could be economists from the school of New Keynesian macroeconomics, such as Olivier Blanchard, Larry Summers and Gregory Mankiw, or economists who work on the issue of inequality, such as Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.