US-based academics Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics “for research into how institutions are formed and influence prosperity”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.
The prestigious prize, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the final prize to be awarded this year and is worth 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million).
“Reducing the enormous income gaps between countries is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of social institutions in achieving this,” says Jakob Svensson, chairman of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.
“Societies with poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better,” the prize organizers added on their website.
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while James Robinson works at the University of Chicago.
Acemoglu and Johnson recently collaborated on a book-length study on technology that showed that some technological advances were better at creating jobs and spreading wealth than others.
The Prize for Economics is not one of the original Prizes for Science, Literature and Peace, created by the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901, but is a later addition established in 1968 by the Sweden's central bank was established and financed.
Past winners include a host of influential thinkers such as Milton Friedman, John Nash – played by actor Russell Crowe in the 2001 film 'A Beautiful Mind' – and, more recently, former US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Last year, Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin won the prize for her work highlighting the causes of wage and labor market inequality between men and women.
The economics prize has been dominated by American academics since its inception, while US-based researchers also often account for a large share of winners in the scientific fields for which the 2024 laureates were announced last week.
That harvest of prizes began with American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the prize for medicine on Monday and ended with Japan's Nihon Hidankyo, an organization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors that campaigned for the abolition of nuclear weapons, winning the prize for peace on Friday received. .
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