Story highlights
The Nobel Prize for economic sciences has been awarded every year since 1969
It is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, or about about $1.47 million
Prizes for peace, literature, chemistry, physics and medicine have been awarded
The winner of the Nobel prize in economics will be announced Monday in Stockholm, Sweden.
The prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, or about about $1.47 million.
The 2010 prize was awarded jointly to Peter A. Diamond of MIT, Dale T. Mortensen of Northwestern University and Christopher A. Pissarides of the London School of Economics and Political Science “for their analysis of markets with search frictions.”
The three received the prize for research on how economic policy affects the job market. Their theories “help us understand the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy,” the academy said.
The three economists’ research focused on so-called “frictions,” or impediments to trade, such as misinformation, cost of transportation or the disparity between companies’ and employees’ needs.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that Diamond, Mortensen and Pissarides focused on how these frictions apply to unemployment, by focusing on the disconnect between employers and the unemployed. Part of the study examines why unemployment remains high when there are workers available to fill the job openings.
Nobel prizes for peace, literature, chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine were awarded last week.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to three women, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen, on Friday “for their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work,” the committee said.
Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. The Swedish academy said it gave the award to Transtromer “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”
On Wednesday, the prize in chemistry was awarded to Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman.
Shechtman is a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and is known for his discovery of quasicrystals.
On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named Saul Perlmutter from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley; Brian P. Schmidt of Australian National University and Adam G. Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute, the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. They made the discovery that our universe apparently is expanding at an accelerating rate some 14 billion years after the Big Bang.
On October 3, the Nobel committee named Ralph Steinman, a biologist with Rockefeller University, and scientists Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann, the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
The Nobel Prize for economic sciences has been awarded every year since 1969, when it was established by Sweden’s central bank.
The youngest laureate in economic sciences is Kenneth J. Arrow, who was 51 years old when he was awarded in 1972. The oldest winner is Leonid Hurwicz, who was 90 years old when he was awarded in 2007. He is also the oldest Laureate to be awarded the Nobel Prize in all areas.
