Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics for their studies on how institutions are formed and how they affect prosperity, as announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday.
The prestigious award, officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million). Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, emphasized the importance of societal institutions in addressing the vast income disparities between countries.
The economics award, established and funded by Sweden’s central bank in 1968, is not one of the original Nobel prizes. Previous winners include influential thinkers such as Milton Friedman, John Nash, and former US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin won the prize last year for her work on the causes of wage and labor market inequality between men and women. The Economics Prize has been dominated by US academics since its inception. Additionally, US-based researchers tend to make up a large portion of winners in the scientific fields for which the 2024 laureates were announced last week.
The Nobel Prize announcements for 2024 began with US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the prize for medicine on Monday and concluded with Japan’s Nihon Hidankyo, an organization of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who campaigned for the abolition of nuclear weapons, receiving the award for peace on Friday.
