Three experts win the Nobel Prize in Economics for investigating the differences in prosperity between countries

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for investigating differences in prosperity between countries, the institution that awards the prize announced on Monday.

Acemoglu and Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while Robinson conducts his research at the University of Chicago and were awarded “for their studies on how institutions are formed and affect prosperity,” reported the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. .

The official name of the award is the Bank of Sweden Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The bank was created in 1968 as a tribute to the 19th century Swedish businessman and chemist, who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prize winners. The first winners were Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen in 1969.

Last year it went to Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin for research that helps explain why women around the world are less likely to work than men and why they earn less money when they do. She was only the third winner of the 93 laureates in economics.

Although Nobel purists emphasize that the economics prize is not technically a Nobel, it is always awarded along with the others at the ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

The Economics prize closes the Nobel announcement season that began on Monday, when Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the Medicine prize. The founding fathers of machine learning, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, won the Physics award on Tuesday.

South Korean writer Han Kang won the Literature prize on Thursday, and Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organization of survivors of the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for its activism against nuclear weapons.

This prestigious award is the last to be awarded this year and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).

With information from Reuters

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