Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is an annual award for outstanding research in economics. Its official name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and it is usually called the Nobel prize in economics. Sweden's central bank, the Riksbank, created it in 1968 to mark its 300th anniversary, and it was first awarded in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch of Norway and Jan Tinbergen of the Netherlands for building dynamic models of the economy.

It is not one of the five prizes set up in Alfred Nobel's 1895 will (physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace), but it is administered by the Nobel Foundation under the same rules, announced alongside them in October and presented at the same ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences chooses the winners. Between 1969 and 2025 it was awarded 57 times to 99 laureates.

Think of the prize as a lifetime-achievement award that arrives years or decades after the work it honours. A committee watches which ideas have stood the test of time, changed how other researchers think, or reshaped how governments and central banks act. Only once an idea has proven itself does the prize follow.

Winning brings a gold medal, a diploma and a share of the prize money, set at 11 million Swedish kronor in 2025. It also brings attention: laureates' ideas are quoted in newspapers and parliaments, and the prize often serves as a public map of how economics has changed.

Each autumn the Prize Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, a small group of academics appointed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, invites nominations from qualified economists worldwide, including past laureates and professors at selected universities. Self-nomination is not allowed. The committee reviews candidates with outside experts and makes a recommendation; the Academy votes on the final choice.

The rules mirror the original Nobel Prizes: no more than three people may share a prize, it is not given posthumously (unless the laureate dies after the announcement), and nominations are sealed for 50 years. The prize money is paid in Swedish kronor and funded by the Riksbank.

The list of winners traces the main currents of modern economics:

• Theory and methods. Early prizes honoured general equilibrium, neoclassical economics and econometrics, with laureates such as Paul Samuelson (1970), Kenneth Arrow and John Hicks (1972).
• Competing schools. The 1974 prize was split between Friedrich Hayek of the Austrian school and the Swedish social democrat Gunnar Myrdal. Milton Friedman (1976) and later Robert Lucas (1995) represented the Chicago school and rational expectations, while George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz and others honoured work on market failures.
• Strategy and behaviour. John Nash and two co-laureates won in 1994 for game theory, Daniel Kahneman in 2002 and Richard Thaler in 2017 for behavioral economics.
• Finance. Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller and William Sharpe (1990) for portfolio theory; Robert Merton and Myron Scholes (1997) for pricing options; and Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig (2022) for research on banks, bank runs and financial crises.
• Development and inequality. Amartya Sen (1998); Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer (2019) for experimental work on poverty; Claudia Goldin (2023) for research on women's labour-market outcomes; and Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson (2024) for showing how institutions shape national prosperity.

The 2025 prize was split: half to Joel Mokyr for identifying the conditions under which technological progress produces sustained growth, and half jointly to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for their theory of growth through creative destruction, a strand of endogenous growth theory in which innovation by new firms displaces old ones.

The 2026 prize, announced on 12 October 2026, went in equal shares to Robert E. Hall of Stanford University and Michael Woodford of Columbia University for work on the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization. Hall is known for research on unemployment, the labour market and the business cycle; Woodford for the theory of interest-rate setting and inflation targeting that underpins much modern monetary policy.

• Legitimacy. Some members of the Nobel family and some scientists argue that the award borrows the Nobel name without being part of Alfred Nobel's legacy, and that economics is not a natural science.
• Authority. In his 1974 banquet speech Hayek himself warned that the prize could lend economists an authority over public policy that the discipline did not justify. Critics cite the 1998 collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, whose partners included Merton and Scholes, and the failure of most economists to foresee the 2008 financial crisis.
• Representation. Most laureates have been men working at US universities; only three women had won by 2026. Heterodox economists argue that schools such as post-Keynesian or Marxian economics are overlooked, while some free-market critics say the prize has drifted toward interventionist ideas.

Defenders reply that the committee has honoured rival schools, from Keynesian economics to its critics, and that many prizes rewarded empirical work that later changed policy.

• The Nobel Prize: Prize in Economic Sciences
• Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences