This year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences goes to the three American economists Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday in Stockholm. Bernanke, former Fed President, and the other two economists will receive the prestigious award “for their research into banks and financial crises,” said the Academy’s Secretary General, Hans Ellegren, at the announcement on the university campus in the Swedish capital.
This means that all Nobel Prize winners for this year have been announced. The names of the winners in the categories medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace had already been announced over the past week. The Nobel Prizes are traditionally presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the prize donor and inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). All Nobel Prizes this year are again endowed with ten million Swedish crowns. That’s the equivalent of almost 915,000 euros at the moment.
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The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is the only one of the Nobel Prizes that does not go back to Nobel’s will. It has been donated by the Swedish Reichsbank since the late 1960s and is therefore, strictly speaking, not one of the classic Nobel Prizes. Last year, the US-based economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens were honored with the prestigious award.
In general, the Nobel Prize in Economics very often goes to economists who come from the USA or do research there. So far, the only German prizewinner in this category has been the Bonn scientist Reinhard Selten: He received the award in 1994 together with John Nash and John Harsanyi for their groundbreaking contributions to non-cooperative game theory.
