Nobel watchers guess who gets economics’ top prize
The committee has been ‘signaling’ that Americans Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein will win this year.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AFP) — Monetary policy, technology, behavioral economics and development are among the fields tipped for this year’s Nobel economics prize, which on Monday brings the 2026 Nobel season to a close.
The winner or winners will be announced in Stockholm at 11:45 a.m., three days after South African jurist Navi Pillay was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Last year, the economics award went to American-Israeli Joel Mokyr, France’s Philippe Aghion and Canada’s Peter Howitt for research into how technology drives and affects growth.
That makes another prize for the same field unlikely this year, according to experts interviewed by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“There is obvious horse-trading between factions in the (Nobel) committee: ‘I support your candidate this year if you support mine next year,’” Richard Tol, an economics professor at the University of Sussex, told AFP.
For Tol, the committee has been “signalling” that Americans Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein will win this year, “perhaps with Matt Rabin,” pioneers in behavioral economics and how we make decisions.
Another “strong candidate” is Michael Woodford in the field of monetary policy, said David Pendlebury of research firm Clarivate, which predicts potential laureates by tracking highly cited academic work.
“It has been a while since that particular area has been recognized,” Pendlebury noted.
Looking at past laureates also shows that the Nobel committee tends to honor research about 20 to 25 years after publication, and Woodford’s key work was “a book published in 2003.”