US-based Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson win 2024 Nobel economics prize

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences declares that James Robinson, Simon Johnson, and Daron Acemoglu have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”

The Stockholm awarding of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Honor of Alfred Nobel was formally known as. The 11 million Swedish Kronor ($1.1 million) prize is the biggest prize of its kind this year.

“Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest challenges”, Jakob Svensson, chairman of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said in a statement.

The winners have demonstrated how crucial social institutions are to accomplishing this, Svensson continued.

The three winners are all employed in America. While Robinson conducts his research at the University of Chicago, Acemoglu and Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I am delighted. It’s just a real shock and amazing news”, Acemoglu told reporters via telephone after the announcement.

The trio’s approach, according to economics analyst Nina Skero, was “relatively novel” because it sought to find “natural experiments in historical examples.”

According to Skero, chief executive officer at Centre for Economics and Business Research, “some of their work looks at historical periods of colonization and the types of institutions that colonizers built in those colonies.”

They claim that if you examine historical sites where colonial powers implemented better institutions, they would end up doing better and producing more wealth, especially during the days of industrialization.

The Alfred Nobel, a dynamite inventor and businessman, gave the first economics award in 1901, but it was not one of the original prizes for science, literature, and peace. The Swedish central bank funded and established it in 1968 as a later addition.

A number of well-known thinkers, including Ben Bernanke, John Nash, and Milton Friedman, have won the Nobel Prize in the past.

Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economic historian, won the Nobel Prize last year for her book exposing the causes of gender wage and labor market disparities.

US academics have dominated the economics prize since its inception, and US-based researchers have a tendency to make up the majority of winners in the scientific fields for which the names of the 2024 laureates were released last week.