Turkish-American economist Daron Acemoglu and British-American economists Simon Johnson and James Robinson won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday.
The trio was awarded “for studies on how institutions form and affect prosperity,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Monday.
The prestigious prize, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the final prize to be awarded this year and is valued at $1.1 million.
“Reducing large income differences between countries is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of social institutions in achieving this,” said Jakob Svensson, Chairman of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee.
The economics prize is not one of the original prizes for science, literature and peace created by the will of dynamite inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901, but a later addition established and financed by the bank central Sweden in 1968.
Past winners include a number of influential thinkers such as Milton Friedman, John Nash (played by actor Russell Crowe in the 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind”) and, most recently, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. , Ben Bernanke.
Last year, Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin won the award 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 tend to make up a large share of winners in the scientific fields for which the 2024 prizes were announced last week.
That series of awards began with American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize on Monday and concluded with the peace prize of Japan's Nihon Hidankyo, an organization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors who campaigned for the abolition of nuclear weapons. .
