Nobel Prizes in Economics

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded since 1969 to economists whose work reshaped how we understand markets, institutions, growth, and human behaviour. This page lists every laureate alongside a representative paper and a one-line summary of the idea that earned the prize. Use it as a map of the discipline — and a reading list for a lifetime.

1969–1979 · The Founding Decade

Year	Laureate(s)	Key Paper	Why It Matters
1969	Ragnar Frisch & Jan Tinbergen	Frisch, “Propagation Problems and Impulse Problems in Dynamic Economics” (1933); Tinbergen, Statistical Testing of Business-Cycle Theories (1939)	Founded econometrics — the marriage of economic theory, mathematics, and statistics.
1970	Paul Samuelson	Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947)	Unified economics under one mathematical framework; the textbook that trained a generation.
1971	Simon Kuznets	“Economic Growth and Income Inequality” (1955)	Invented GDP measurement and showed that inequality first rises, then falls, as countries develop.
1972	Kenneth Arrow & John Hicks	Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951); Hicks, Value and Capital (1939)	Arrow proved no voting system is perfect; Hicks formalised how consumers and firms make choices.
1973	Wassily Leontief	The Structure of the American Economy (1941)	Created input–output analysis — tracking how industries depend on each other through the whole economy.
1974	Friedrich Hayek & Gunnar Myrdal	Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945); Myrdal, Monetary Equilibrium (1939)	Hayek argued prices carry information no planner can match; Myrdal showed how expectations drive cycles.
1975	Leonid Kantorovich & Tjalling Koopmans	Kantorovich, “Mathematical Methods of Organizing and Planning Production” (1939)	Developed linear programming — the maths behind every modern logistics and resource-allocation problem.
1976	Milton Friedman	A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (1963, with A. Schwartz)	Demonstrated that bad monetary policy, not capitalism, caused the Great Depression.
1977	James Meade & Bertil Ohlin	Ohlin, Interregional and International Trade (1933)	Explained why countries trade what they trade — the Heckscher–Ohlin model still anchors trade theory.
1978	Herbert Simon	“A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice” (1955)	Showed that real humans don’t optimise perfectly — they “satisfice,” launching behavioural economics.
1979	Arthur Lewis & Theodore Schultz	Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour” (1954)	Lewis explained how surplus farm labour fuels industrialisation; Schultz showed education is an investment.

1980–1989 · Macro Wars and Market Design

Year	Laureate(s)	Key Paper	Why It Matters
1980	Lawrence Klein	Economic Fluctuations in the United States, 1921–1941 (1950)	Built the first large-scale econometric forecasting models used by governments worldwide.
1981	James Tobin	“Liquidity Preference as Behavior Towards Risk” (1958)	Showed how investors balance risk and return — the theory behind portfolio diversification.
1982	George Stigler	“The Economics of Information” (1961)	Recognised that searching for prices is costly, explaining why identical goods sell at different prices.
1983	Gérard Debreu	Theory of Value (1959)	Gave a rigorous mathematical proof that competitive markets can reach equilibrium.
1984	Richard Stone	UN System of National Accounts (1953)	Designed the accounting system every country uses to measure GDP — the backbone of macroeconomic data.
1985	Franco Modigliani	“The Life Cycle Hypothesis of Saving” (1954, with R. Brumberg)	People save when young and spend when old — a simple idea that reshaped pension and fiscal policy.
1986	James Buchanan	The Calculus of Consent (1962, with G. Tullock)	Applied economic self-interest to politicians and voters, founding public-choice theory.
1987	Robert Solow	“A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” (1956)	The Solow model showed that long-run growth comes from technology, not just capital accumulation.
1988	Maurice Allais	“The Allais Paradox” in Econometrica (1953)	Revealed that people violate expected-utility theory systematically — decades before Kahneman.
1989	Trygve Haavelmo	“The Probability Approach in Econometrics” (1944)	Argued that economic data should be treated as random samples, founding modern statistical inference in economics.

1990–1999 · Finance, Games, and Institutions

Year	Laureate(s)	Key Paper	Why It Matters
1990	Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller & William Sharpe	Markowitz, “Portfolio Selection” (JF, 1952); Sharpe, “Capital Asset Prices” (1964)	Created modern portfolio theory and the CAPM — the mathematics Wall Street runs on.
1991	Ronald Coase	“The Problem of Social Cost” (1960); “The Nature of the Firm” (1937)	Explained why firms exist and showed that property rights, not regulation, can solve externalities.
1992	Gary Becker	Human Capital (1964); “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” (1968)	Applied economic reasoning to education, discrimination, crime, and the family — economics without borders.
1993	Robert Fogel & Douglass North	North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990)	Fogel used data to reassess slavery and railroads; North showed institutions are the key to prosperity.
1994	John Harsanyi, John Nash & Reinhard Selten	Nash, “Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games” (1950)	Formalised game theory — every strategic interaction in economics now uses the Nash equilibrium.
1995	Robert Lucas Jr.	“Econometric Policy Evaluation: A Critique” (1976)	The Lucas Critique: historical relationships break when policy changes, revolutionising macro modelling.
1996	James Mirrlees & William Vickrey	Mirrlees, “An Exploration in the Theory of Optimum Income Taxation” (1971)	Designed optimal taxes when the government can’t observe people’s abilities — the foundation of tax theory.
1997	Robert C. Merton & Myron Scholes	Black & Scholes, “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities” (1973)	The Black–Scholes formula — how to price any financial derivative; launched quantitative finance.
1998	Amartya Sen	Poverty and Famines (1981); Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970)	Proved famines are caused by rights failures, not food shortages; redefined development as freedom.
1999	Robert Mundell	“A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas” (AER, 1961)	The intellectual blueprint for the euro — when should countries share a currency?

2000–2009 · Causality, Behaviour, and Development

Year	Laureate(s)	Key Paper	Why It Matters
2000	James Heckman & Daniel McFadden	Heckman, “Sample Selection Bias as a Specification Error” (1979)	Heckman corrected a statistical bias found in almost every social-science dataset; McFadden modelled discrete choices.
2001	George Akerlof, Michael Spence & Joseph Stiglitz	Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’” (QJE, 1970)	Showed how information asymmetry can destroy markets — why used cars, insurance, and credit markets fail.
2002	Daniel Kahneman & Vernon Smith	Kahneman & Tversky, “Prospect Theory” (Econometrica, 1979)	People overweight losses and distort probabilities — a new model of decision-making that challenged rationality.
2003	Robert Engle & Clive Granger	Engle, “Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity” (1982); Granger, “Co-Integration and Error Correction” (1987)	Gave finance the tools to model volatility clustering and long-run relationships in time series.
2004	Finn Kydland & Edward Prescott	“Rules Rather Than Discretion” (JPE, 1977); “Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations” (1982)	Showed governments face a credibility problem and that technology shocks can drive business cycles.
2005	Robert Aumann & Thomas Schelling	Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960)	Aumann formalised repeated games; Schelling showed how focal points and credible threats shape Cold War–era strategy.
2006	Edmund Phelps	“Phillips Curves, Expectations of Inflation and Optimal Unemployment over Time” (1967)	Added expectations to the Phillips Curve — there is no permanent trade-off between inflation and unemployment.
2007	Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin & Roger Myerson	Myerson, “Optimal Auction Design” (1981)	Founded mechanism design theory — how to build rules that make self-interested agents reveal the truth.
2008	Paul Krugman	“Increasing Returns and Economic Geography” (JPE, 1991)	Explained why economic activity clusters in cities and industrial belts — the New Economic Geography.
2009	Elinor Ostrom & Oliver Williamson	Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)	Ostrom showed communities can manage shared resources without privatisation or regulation — the first woman laureate.

2010–2019 · Markets, Experiments, and Inequality

Year	Laureate(s)	Key Paper	Why It Matters
2010	Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen & Christopher Pissarides	The DMP model: Pissarides, Equilibrium Unemployment Theory (1990)	Explained why unemployment persists even when jobs are available — search frictions in labour markets.
2011	Thomas Sargent & Christopher Sims	Sims, “Macroeconomics and Reality” (Econometrica, 1980)	Sargent formalised rational expectations in policy; Sims created VARs — the workhorse of empirical macro.
2012	Alvin Roth & Lloyd Shapley	Gale & Shapley, “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage” (1962)	Invented stable matching — now used to assign doctors to hospitals, students to schools, and organ donors to patients.
2013	Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen & Robert Shiller	Fama, “Efficient Capital Markets” (1970); Shiller, “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much?” (1981)	Fama said markets are efficient; Shiller said they’re driven by irrational exuberance. Both were right, in different ways.
2014	Jean Tirole	The Theory of Industrial Organization (1988)	Showed how to regulate monopolies and platforms — the theory behind modern antitrust policy.
2015	Angus Deaton	“An Almost Ideal Demand System” (1980, with J. Muellbauer); The Great Escape (2013)	Measured how the world’s poorest actually spend their money — transforming development and welfare analysis.
2016	Oliver Hart & Bengt Holmström	Holmström, “Moral Hazard and Observability” (1979); Grossman & Hart, “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership” (1986)	Designed optimal contracts — how to write pay structures that align incentives between bosses and workers, buyers and sellers.
2017	Richard Thaler	Nudge (2008, with C. Sunstein); “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice” (1980)	Brought behavioural economics to policy — governments worldwide now use “nudge units” to improve decisions.
2018	William Nordhaus & Paul Romer	Nordhaus, DICE model (1992); Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change” (JPE, 1990)	Nordhaus put a price on carbon emissions; Romer showed ideas drive growth — two models for the century’s biggest challenges.
2019	Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo & Michael Kremer	Kremer, “The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development” (1993); Banerjee & Duflo, Poor Economics (2011)	Used randomised controlled trials to test what actually works in fighting poverty — evidence over ideology.

2020–2025 · Causes, Crises, and Innovation

Year	Laureate(s)	Key Paper	Why It Matters
2020	Paul Milgrom & Robert Wilson	Milgrom & Weber, “A Theory of Auctions and Competitive Bidding” (1982)	Redesigned how governments sell spectrum, electricity, and permits — auction theory put into practice.
2021	David Card, Joshua Angrist & Guido Imbens	Card & Krueger, “Minimum Wages and Employment” (AER, 1994); Angrist & Imbens, “Identification and Estimation of Local Average Treatment Effects” (1994)	Card’s natural experiments overturned textbook predictions on minimum wages; Angrist and Imbens built the causal-inference toolkit.
2022	Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond & Philip Dybvig	Diamond & Dybvig, “Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity” (JPE, 1983); Bernanke, “Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression” (AER, 1983)	Explained why banks are fragile by design and how financial crises amplify recessions.
2023	Claudia Goldin	“The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family” (AER, 2006)	Traced 200 years of data to show why the gender pay gap persists — it’s about time flexibility, not discrimination alone.
2024	Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson & James A. Robinson	“The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development” (AER, 2001); Why Nations Fail (2012)	Showed that inclusive institutions — not geography, culture, or luck — determine why some nations are rich and others poor.
2025	Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion & Peter Howitt	Aghion & Howitt, “A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction” (Econometrica, 1992); Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena (2002)	Mokyr identified how a “culture of improvement” enabled sustained innovation; Aghion and Howitt formalised Schumpeter’s creative destruction as an engine of growth.

By the Numbers

57 prizes awarded (1969–2025)
96 laureates (some years have multiple winners)
3 women laureates: Elinor Ostrom (2009), Esther Duflo (2019), Claudia Goldin (2023)
Youngest winner: Esther Duflo, age 46 (2019)
Most represented institution: University of Chicago