Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson & James A. Robinson awarded 2024 Nobel Economics Prize | World News

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”

“The laureates’ model for explaining the circumstances under which political institutions are formed and changed has three components. The first is a conflict over how resources are allocated and who holds decision-making power in a society (the elite or the masses),” the Nobel Prize said in a post on X.

“The second is that the masses sometimes have the opportunity to exercise power by mobilising and threatening the ruling elite; power in a society is thus more than the power to make decisions. The third is the commitment problem, which means that the only alternative is for the elite to hand over decision-making power to the populace,” the X post read.

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This award is officially known as the ‘Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. 

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The central bank established it as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes. The first winners were Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen in 1969.

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2023 Nobel Economics Prize

Last year, Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin was honored for her research that helps explain why women around the world are less likely than men to work and why they earn less money when they do. She was only the third woman among the 93 economics laureates.

Though Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, it is always presented together with the others on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.