AFP UK

Three US-based academics on Monday won the Nobel Economics Prize for research on the labour market using “natural experiments”, or observational studies, that have revolutionised empirical research in the field, the jury said.

Canadian-American David Card, Israeli-American Joshua Angrist and Dutch-American Guido Imbens shared the prize for providing “new insights about the labour market” and showing “what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.

The Economics Prize wrapped up a male-dominated 2021 Nobel season which saw a total of 12 men win prizes and only one woman.

Card won half of the 10-million-kronor ($1.1 million, one million euro) prize for work focused on the labour market effects of minimum wages, immigration and education.  

The Canadian-born professor at University of California at Berkeley commented on the honour in a self-effacing manner, saying in a statement that his “contributions are pretty modest.”

In natural experiments, researchers study the result of chance events or policy changes on groups of people, unlike other experiments where scientists have control over their subjects.

“Most old-fashioned economists are very theoretical, but these days, a large fraction of economics is really very nuts-and-bolts, looking at subjects like education or health, or at the effects of immigration,” Card said in a statement published by his university.

“These are really very, very simple things. So, my big contribution was to oversimplify the field,” he added.

Card’s studies from the early 1990s, where he evaluated the effects of a raised minimum wage in New Jersey, showed for example that raising the minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs. 

Focusing on fast-food workers, Card used eastern Pennsylvania, which has a similar labour market, as a control group.

Card also used other natural experiments — such as the sudden influx of 125,000 Cubans to the US in 1980 — to study the impact of immigration and education.

The Nobel committee noted that “we now know that the incomes of people who were born in a country can benefit from new immigration, while people who immigrated at an earlier time risk being negatively affected. We have also realised that resources in schools are far more important for students’ future labour market success than was previously thought.” 

However, data from natural experiments are difficult to interpret. 

For their work helping to solve that methodological problem, the other half of the prize went jointly to Angrist, 61, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Imbens, a 58-year-old professor at Stanford.

In research they conducted in the mid-1990s, they demonstrated how “precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn,” and specifically what conclusions can be drawn.

– Revolutionising work –

The framework they developed has been widely adopted by researchers who work with observational data.

“By clarifying the assumptions necessary to establish a causal relationship, their framework has also increased the transparency – and thus credibility – of empirical research,” the committee said.

The three economists know each other well, and Angrist told the Nobel Foundation that Card had made a strong impression on him when he was one of Card’s graduate students.

“I’m lucky to have been able to work with them and learn from them,” said Angrist, who has also worked closely with Imbens.

“Josh Angrist was actually the best man at my wedding so he is a good friend, both professionally and personally, and I’m just thrilled to share the prize with him and David,” Imbens told reporters during a phone interview following the announcement.

The three laureates “have revolutionised empirical work in economics. They have shown that it’s indeed possible to answer important questions, even when it’s not possible to conduct randomised experiments,” Nobel Committee member Eva Mork told reporters.

– Male dominated –

Last year, the honour went to US economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for their work on theories of auctions as well as inventing new auction formats.

Like this year, the Economics Prize has been male-dominated. It has only been awarded to two women since it was first awarded in 1969: Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019. 

The only woman to win a Nobel Prize this year is investigative journalist Maria Ressa of the Philippines, who shared the Peace Prize with Dmitry Muratov of Russia for their work promoting freedom of expression at a time when liberty of the press is increasingly under threat.

Millions of lives could be saved by reining in global warming, the World Health Organization said Monday, urging the COP26 summit to take serious climate action to improve public health worldwide.

“The burning of fossil fuels is killing us,” the World Health Organization said in an 82-page COP26 special report. “Climate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity.”

In the report, entitled “The Health Argument for Climate Action”, the WHO set out 10 recommendations on how to maximise the health benefits of tackling climate change — and avoid the worst health impacts of the climate crisis.

Countries must set ambitious national climate commitments to foster a healthy recovery from the Covid-19 crisis, said the report.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has shone a light on the intimate and delicate links between humans, animals and our environment,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“The same unsustainable choices that are killing our planet are killing people.

“WHO calls on all countries to commit to decisive action at COP26 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s in our own interests.”

COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference, is being held in Glasgow from October 31 to November 12.

– Death toll –

Achieving the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement — which included preferably limiting the rise in mean global temperature to 1.5 C — would save millions of lives every year due to improvements in air quality, diet, and physical activity, said the report.

Air pollution, primarily the result of burning fossil fuels, caused 13 deaths per minute worldwide — and the public health benefits of ambitious climate action would far outweigh the costs.

“Bringing down air pollution to WHO guideline levels, for example, would reduce the total number of global deaths from air pollution by 80 percent,” said Maria Neira, the WHO’s environment, climate change and health director.

Switching to more plant-based diets “could reduce global emissions significantly, ensure more resilient food systems, and avoid up to 5.1 million diet-related deaths a year by 2050”, she added.

The WHO’s 10 recommendations urge COP negotiators to place health at the heart of the summit and commit to a green recovery from Covid-19.

The WHO wants climate interventions with the largest health gains prioritised, with health resilience to climate risks included in planning.

The report called a shift away from coal combustion to renewable energy as part of a move towards energy systems that improve health.

It also urged the redesign of urban environments to increase access to green space and for walking, cycling and public transport to be prioritised.

And it sent an open letter signed by organisations representing more than two thirds of the global health workforce urging leaders to step up climate action at Glasgow.

“We are already responding to the health harms caused by climate change,” said the letter, penned by 300 organisations representing at least 45 million health professionals.

“Make human health and equity central to all climate change mitigation and adaptation actions,” the joint letter said.

Three US-based academics on Monday won the Nobel Economics Prize for research on the labour market using “natural experiments”, or observational studies, that have revolutionised empirical research in the field, the jury said.

Canadian-American David Card, Israeli-American Joshua Angrist and Dutch-American Guido Imbens shared the prize for providing “new insights about the labour market” and showing “what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.

The Economics Prize wrapped up a male-dominated 2021 Nobel season which saw a total of 12 men win prizes and only one woman.

Card won half of the 10-million-kronor ($1.1 million, one million euro) prize for work focused on the labour market effects of minimum wages, immigration and education.  

The Canadian-born professor at the University of California in Berkeley was caught off guard by the nod.

“I don’t think I would have been a very high probability,” he told the Nobel Foundation, explaining that he was talking to them wearing pyjamas.

In natural experiments, researchers study the result of chance events or policy changes on groups of people, unlike other experiments where scientists have control over their subjects.

Card’s studies from the early 1990s, where he evaluated the effects of a raised minimum wage in New Jersey, showed for example that raising the minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs. 

Focusing on fast-food workers, Card used eastern Pennsylvania, which has similar labour market, as a control group.

Card also used other natural experiments — such as the sudden influx of 125,000 Cubans to the US in 1980 — to study the impact of immigration and education.

“We now know that the incomes of people who were born in a country can benefit from new immigration, while people who immigrated at an earlier time risk being negatively affected. We have also realised that resources in schools are far more important for students’ future labour market success than was previously thought,” the Nobel committee said.

However, data from a natural experiment are difficult to interpret. 

For their work helping to solve that methodological problem, the other half of the prize went jointly to Angrist, 61, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Imbens, a 58-year-old professor at Stanford.

In research they conducted in the mid-1990s, they demonstrated how “precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn,” and specifically what conclusions can be drawn.

– Revolutionising work –

The framework they developed has been widely adopted by researchers who work with observational data.

“By clarifying the assumptions necessary to establish a causal relationship, their framework has also increased the transparency – and thus credibility – of empirical research,” the committee said.

“I was absolutely stunned to get a telephone call,” Imbens told reporters during a phone interview following the announcement.

“Josh Angrist was actually the best man at my wedding so he is a good friend, both professionally and personally, and I’m just thrilled to share the prize with him and David,” he added.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte congratulated the Eindhoven-born economist.

“A world achievement with a Dutch touch. Congratulations!,” Rutte said in a tweet.

The three laureates “have revolutionised empirical work in economics. They have shown that it’s indeed possible to answer important questions, even when it’s not possible to conduct randomised experiments,” Nobel Committee member Eva Mork told reporters.

– ‘False Nobel’ –

Last year, the honour went to US economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for their work on theories of auctions as well as inventing new auction formats.

The Economics Prize is the only Nobel not among the original five prizes set out by the will of Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. 

It was instead created through a donation from the Swedish central bank in 1968, and detractors have thus dubbed it “a false Nobel”.

Just like this year, the Economics Prize has generally been male-dominated. It has only been awarded to two women since it was first awaded in 1969: Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019. 

The only woman to win a Nobel Prize this year is investigative journalist Maria Ressa of the Philippines, who shared the Peace Prize with Dmitry Muratov of Russia for their work promoting freedom of expression at a time when liberty of the press is increasingly under threat.

Energy exporter Canada on Monday promised tough action against methane, a major contributor to climate change, as momentum builds for an ambitious global deal in Glasgow next month.

Twenty-four more nations pledged action against methane in a virtual meeting led by the United States and the European Union, which earlier announced a joint initiative on the potent gas.

Canada will aim to reduce methane from its oil and gas sector by at least 75 percent by 2030 from 2012 levels, becoming the first country to back a goal by the International Energy Agency, Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said.

“A 75 percent target is an important goal, and we encourage other oil- and gas-producing nations to adopt it,” he said.

“As we like to say in Canada, we certainly get it.”

The methane promise is in line with promises by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as he won a third term in elections last month.

Wilkinson said the methane effort was part of Canada’s overall goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40-45 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels — a target announced in April by Trudeau that is less ambitious than that of much of the developed world.

Methane, emitted by oil and gas production and agriculture, spends less time in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide but is far more potent and is seen as a key area where the world can take action.

A joint initiative launched last month by the United States and European Union called for global methane reductions of 30 percent by 2030 from 2020 levels.

At Monday’s meeting, philanthropic institutions — including that of former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg — together promised $223 million to boost efforts on reducing methane.

The COP26 summit in Glasgow aims to raise the global fight on climate change as evidence mounts that the world is off track, with the planet setting record temperatures and experiencing increasingly severe fires and storms.

“It’s clear that we’re in a race against time. It is far, far, far more expensive to be dealing with the problems of the climate crisis over time than it is to deal with it now,” said John Kerry, the US climate envoy.

“Hopefully that all changes in the next weeks,” he said, adding he was “encouraged” by recent promises.

Norway’s Supreme Court on Monday ruled that two wind parks built in the country’s west were harming reindeer herders from the Sami people by encroaching on their pastures.

It was not immediately clear what the consequences of the finding will be.

But lawyers for the herders say the 151 turbines completed on the Fosen peninsula in 2020 — part of the biggest land-based wind park in Europe — could be torn down.

“Their construction has been declared illegal, and it would be illegal to continue operating them,” said Andreas Bronner, who represented a group of herders alleging harm from one of the two parks.

Ole Berthelsen, a spokesman for Norway’s ministry for oil and energy, said that “the Supreme Court verdict creates a need to clarify the situation”, adding it would “communicate later about what to do next”.

The judges declared the licences issued by the ministry to build and operate the turbines void, saying they violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The UN text’s Article 27 states that ethnic minorities “shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language.”

Traditional Sami reindeer herding is a form of protected cultural practice, the Norwegian court found.

“Of course, this is a surprise to us,” said Tom Kristian Larsen, head of Fosen Vind, which operates one of the wind farms.

“We based our action on definitive licences granted us by the authorities after a long and detailed process that heard from all parties,” he added.

“Special importance was given to reindeer herding”.

The company said it would now wait for the ministry’s decision on next steps.

The Sami people number up to 100,000 people spread across Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia.

Some of them make a living from raising semi-domesticated reindeer for their meat and hides.

Three US-based academics on Monday won the Nobel Economics Prize for research on the labour market using “natural experiments”, or observational studies, that have revolutionised empirical research in the field, the jury said.

Canadian-American David Card, Israeli-American Joshua Angrist and Dutch-American Guido Imbens shared the prize for providing “new insights about the labour market” and showing “what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.

The Economics Prize wrapped up a male-dominated 2021 Nobel season which saw a total of 12 men win prizes and only one woman.

Card, a Canadian-born professor at the University of California in Berkeley, won half of the 10-million-kronor ($1.1 million, one million euro) prize for work focused on the labour market effects of minimum wages, immigration and education.  

In natural experiments, researchers study the result of chance events or policy changes on groups of people, unlike other experiments where scientists have control over their subjects.

Card’s studies from the early 1990s showed for example that raising the minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs. 

“We now know that the incomes of people who were born in a country can benefit from new immigration, while people who immigrated at an earlier time risk being negatively affected. We have also realised that resources in schools are far more important for students’ future labour market success than was previously thought,” the Nobel committee said.

However, data from a natural experiment are difficult to interpret. 

For their work helping to solve that methodological problem, the other half of the prize went jointly to Angrist, 61, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Imbens, a 58-year-old professor at Stanford.

In research they conducted in the mid-1990s, they demonstrated how “precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn.”

– Revolutionising work –

The framework they developed has been widely adopted by researchers who work with observational data.

“By clarifying the assumptions necessary to establish a causal relationship, their framework has also increased the transparency – and thus credibility – of empirical research,” the committee said.

“I was absolutely stunned to get a telephone call,” Imbens told reporters during a phone interview following the announcement.

“Josh Angrist was actually the best man at my wedding so he is a good friend, both professionally and personally, and I’m just thrilled to share the prize with him and David,” he added.

The three laureates “have revolutionised empirical work in economics. They have shown that it’s indeed possible to answer important questions, even when it’s not possible to conduct randomized experiments,” Nobel Committee member Eva Mork told reporters in announcing the prize.

– ‘False Nobel’ –

Last year, the honour went to US economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for their work on theories of auctions as well as inventing new auction formats.

The Economics Prize, officially the Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was the only prize not among the original five set out by the will of Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. 

It was instead created through a donation from the Swedish central bank in 1968, and detractors have thus dubbed it “a false Nobel”.

Just like this year, the Economics Prize has generally been male-dominated. It has only been awarded to two women since it was first awaded in 1969: Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019. 

The only woman to win a Nobel Prize this year is investigative journalist Maria Ressa of the Philippines, who shared the Peace Prize with Dmitry Muratov of Russia for their work promoting freedom of expression at a time when liberty of the press is increasingly under threat.

Inside a huge crater in Israel’s sun-baked Negev desert, a team wearing space suits ventures forth on a mission to simulate conditions on Mars.

The Austrian Space Forum has set up a pretend Martian base with the Israeli space agency at Makhtesh Ramon, a 500-metre (1,600-foot) deep, 40 kilometre (25 mile) wide crater.

The six so-called “analogue astronauts” will live in isolation in the virtual station until the end of the month.

“It’s a dream come true,” Israeli Alon Tenzer, 36, told AFP. “It’s something we’ve been working on for years.” 

The participants — from Austria, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain — all had to pass gruelling physical and psychological tests.

During their mission, they will conduct tests including on a drone prototype that functions without GPS, and on automated wind- and solar-powered mapping vehicles.

The mission will also aim to study human behaviour and the effect of isolation on the astronauts.

“The group’s cohesion and their ability to work together are crucial for surviving on Mars,” said Gernot Groemer, the Austrian mission supervisor.

“It’s like a marriage, except in a marriage you can leave but on Mars you can’t.”

– ‘Largest voyage ever’ –

The Austrian Space Forum, a private organisation made up of aerospace specialists, has already organised 12 missions, the most recent in Oman in 2018. 

The Israel project is part of mission Amadee-20, which was expected to kick off last year but was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The forum has partnered with Israeli research centre D-MARS to construct the solar-powered base.

German astronaut Anika Mehlis, the only woman on the team, told AFP how happy she was to be part of the project. 

“My father took me to the space museum when I was little,” she said. “When I saw that the forum was looking for analogue astronauts, I told myself I had to apply.” 

Mehlis, a trained microbiologist, will study a scenario where bacteria from Earth infect potential life forms that may be found on Mars, saying this “would be a huge problem”.

Visually, the surrounding desert resembles the Red Planet with its stony wilderness and orange hues, though thankfully not in terms of atmospheric conditions.

“Over here, we have temperatures of about 25-30 degrees Celsius, but on Mars the temperature is minus 60 degrees Celsius and the atmosphere is not fit for breathing,” said Groemer.

The interior of the base is austere, with a small kitchen and bunk beds. Most of the space is reserved for scientific experiments.

NASA envisions the first human mission to Mars will launch in 2030.

“What we are doing here is preparing a large mission, the largest voyage our society has ever taken, as Mars and Earth are 380 million kilometres apart at their extreme point,” said Groemer.

“I believe the very first human to walk on Mars is already born and we are the ship-builders to enable this journey.”

Three US-based academics on Monday won the Nobel Economics Prize for research that “revolutionised” empirical work in their field and brought better understanding of how labour markets work, the jury said.

Canadian David Card, Israeli-American Joshua Angrist and Dutch-American Guido Imbens shared the prize for providing “new insights about the labour market” and showing “what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.

Card’s work has focused on the labour market effects of minimum wages, immigration and education. Angrist and Imbens demonstrated how precise cause and effect conclusions can be.

Half of the 10-million-kronor ($1.1 million, one million euro) prize went to Card, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was born in Canada in 1956, “for his empirical contributions to labour economics.”

The other half went jointly to Angrist, 61, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Imbens, 58, a professor at Stanford, “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.”

“I was absolutely stunned to get a telephone call,” Imbens told reporters during a phone interview following the announcement.

“Josh Angrist was actually the best man at my wedding so he is a good friend, both professionally and personally, and I’m just thrilled to share the prize with him and David,” he added.

The three laureates “have revolutionised empirical work in economics. They have shown that it’s indeed possible to answer important questions, even when it’s not possible to conduct randomized experiment,” Nobel Committee member Eva Mork told reporters in announcing the prize.

The trio was honoured for their work using so-called “natural experiments”, in which chance events or policy changes result in groups of people being treated differently, in a way that resembles clinical trials in medicine.

– ‘False Nobel’ –

Last year, the honour went to US economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for their work on theories of auctions as well as inventing new auction formats.

The economics prize, officially the Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was the only prize not among the original five set out by the will of Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. 

It was instead created through a donation from the Swedish central bank in 1968, and detractors have thus dubbed it “a false Nobel”.

Just like this year, the Economics Prize has generally been male-dominated. It has only been awarded to two women in history, Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019. 

All three of this year’s economics laureates were among those speculated for the prestigious award, in contrast to the winners of the other prizes this year.

The Peace Prize went to investigative journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia, while the Literature Prize was won by Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah.

The Medicine Prize went to US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch.

The Chemistry Prize went to Germany’s Benjamin List and Scottish-American David MacMillan for their work on catalysts. 

For the first time, the Physics Prize went to two climate scientists, Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany, with the second half of the prize going to Giorgio Parisi of Italy.

The Nobel Foundation has already announced that the glittering prize ceremony and banquet held in Stockholm in December for the science and literature laureates will not happen this year due to the pandemic.

A decision has yet to be made about the lavish Peace Prize ceremony held in Oslo on the same day.

A key UN summit tasked with protecting biodiversity officially opens in China and online Monday, as countries meet to tackle pollution and prevent mass extinction weeks before the COP26 climate conference.

Beijing, the world’s biggest polluter, has sought to position itself in recent years as a world leader on climate issues after Washington’s withdrawal from international commitments under the Trump administration.

The online session that begins Monday afternoon — setting the stage for a face-to-face meeting in April — will see parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) working out the details of a new document that will set targets for protecting ecosystems by 2030.

Up for debate are the “30 by 30” plan to give 30 percent of lands and oceans protected status — a measure supported by a broad coalition of nations, as well as a goal to stop creating plastic waste.

China has not yet committed to the “30 by 30” plan.

This year’s COP15 gathering, hosted in the southwest city of Kunming, was originally set for 2020 and postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Around one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction amid human encroachment on habitats, over-exploitation, pollution, the spread of invasive species, and climate change. 

The CBD has been ratified by 195 countries and the European Union — although not the United States, the world’s biggest historical polluter — with parties meeting every two years.

– Division over targets –

China said on Friday it has “given high priority to the protection of biodiversity by establishing a network of protected areas and national parks.”

And this week Beijing is expected to unveil a statement known as the Kunming Declaration, which would set the tone for its environmental leadership.

But sharp divisions remain over the targets for urgent action over the next decade.

France and Costa Rica are among a coalition of support for the initiative to declare 30 percent of oceans and lands protected areas before 2030.

But when scientists called for more ambitious protection of half of Earth’s biodiversity, Brazil and South Africa strongly opposed.

Other sources of tension surround financing, with developing nations asking rich countries to foot the bill for their ecological transitions.

These issues will be at the heart of negotiation sessions set to take place in Geneva in January 2022.

The biodiversity discussions at COP15 are separate from weightier COP26 summit set to begin next month in Glasgow, where world leaders are under pressure to act on the climate crisis.

The Glasgow summit faces a packed agenda dominated by efforts to persuade countries such as China and India to commit to binding “nationally determined contributions” towards net zero emissions.

China has pledged to peak carbon emissions in 2030 and reach zero emissions by 2060, but environmentalists have flagged the huge amount of coal-fired power being brought online in recent years by the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases.

The Nobel Economics Prize on Monday wraps up a Nobel season characterised by surprising picks, with a number of women in with a chance of scooping the traditionally male-dominated prize.

Macroeconomics, health and labour markets are some of the favourite topics ahead of the announcement, according to experts interviewed by AFP.

The final prize of the year, officially the Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, will be announced at 11:45 am (0945 GMT).

This Nobel season, only one woman has won — Philippine journalist Maria Ressa who won the Peace Prize on Friday — while the economics prize has so far only been awarded to two women in history, Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019. 

American Anne Krueger, formerly the number two and briefly the managing director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as a former Vice President for Economics and Research at the World Bank, is one possible winner.

At 87, she is also “getting older, which usually isn’t a handicap when it comes to winning Nobel Prizes”, Micael Dahlen, a professor in marketing at the Stockholm School of Economics, told AFP.

Her compatriot Claudia Goldin, whose research has focused on inequality and the female labour force, is another favourite to become the third woman to receive the prize.

Other potential female winners are fellow American Janet Currie, known for her work on the impact of government anti-poverty programmes on children, or Belgian labour economist Marianne Bertrand and American microeconomist Susan Athey, who was the first woman to win the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal in 2007.

– Hundreds of candidates –

However, as with any of the Nobels, accurately predicting the winner is a challenge as there is a plethora of economists for the committee to choose from.

“There are around 250-300 serious candidates,” Hubert Fromlet, an affiliated professor with the Linnaeus University in Sweden, wrote in a paper predicting potential winners.

Given that the entire selection process, including nominations, has taken place during the Covid-19 pandemic, Dahlen said it would also be “very topical” to focus on an economist like Paul Slovic. 

Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon who has looked into how people weigh risk, and introduced the concept of “psychic numbing”, the indifference that can set in when people are confronted with an overwhelming calamity.

It could also be time to shine a spotlight on the field of macroeconomics, especially given the economic fallout of the pandemic, and the historical zero-interest policies of central banks around the world even before Covid-19.

For Dahlen, a frontrunner would be Roger W. Garrison.

According to Clarivate, which maintains a list of potential Nobel Prize winners, other potential macroeconomists that could be honoured are Japan’s Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and his at-times writing partner John Moore of the UK.

In the context of financial crises, American Douglas Diamond has also been cited as a potential candidate.

Another oft-mentioned economist believed to be in the running is Israeli-American Joshua Angrist, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who is an expert on labour economics and the economics of education and who has also made contributions to the field of econometrics, potentially together with Canadian labour economist David Card.

– ‘False Nobel’ –

French economists Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist at the IMF, and Thomas Piketty, who rose to prominence with his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” have also attracted attention.

But given disagreements about Piketty’s conclusions he would be a “controversial choice”, according to Fromlet.

Last year, the honour went to US economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for their work on theories of auctions as well as inventing new auction formats.

The economics prize was the only prize not among the original five set out by the will of Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. 

It was instead created through a donation from the Swedish central bank in 1968, and detractors have thus dubbed it “a false Nobel”.

The prize will close the 2021 Nobel season, which so far has seen the peace prize awarded to Ressa, who is also a US citizen, and fellow journalist Dmitry Muratov of Russia. 

The literature prize was won by Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah.

The medicine prize, which opened the week, went to US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch.

The chemistry prize went to Germany’s Benjamin List and Scottish-American David MacMillan for their work on catalysts. 

For the first time, the physics prize went to two climate scientists, Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany, with the second half of the prize going to Giorgio Parisi of Italy.