The winner of this year’s Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be announced on Monday, 12 October. Polish economists have pointed to a wide palette of possible laureates, with just a few names appearing in most of their predictions.
Ariel Pakes of Harvard University held the highest position on Polymarket, the online betting platform, according to the odds recorded on 8 October. The Harvard scholar is the single most frequently mentioned favourite in the debate about this year’s award.
The case for industrial organization
– I know that in the academic community the emphasis this year is strongly on the economics of competition, especially on Pakes – said Justyna Klejdysz of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the ifo Institute.
The jury’s possible reasoning rests on Pakes’s methods for estimating demand, production functions and margins. They allow researchers to forecast what will happen once the structure of a market shifts, for example as a result of a merger.
– A Nobel for industrial organization would fit the controversial but increasingly popular trends in industrial policy – commented Marcin Klucznik, senior adviser in the World Economy Team at the Polish Economic Institute.
Klucznik also sees a scenario in which the Harvard economist shares the prize with two co-authors, Steven Berry and James Levinsohn.
Monetary policy and machine learning
Relatively high chances on the shortlist also belong to Michael Woodford of Columbia University and Susan Athey of Stanford University.
Woodford is the pick of Dr Piotr Arak of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw.
– He is an economist who gave central banks the intellectual foundation for what they do today. In his 2003 book „Interest and Prices” he built a model on which modern monetary policy rests, from the Fed through the ECB to the NBP – said Arak.
The predictions described above were reported by the daily Rzeczpospolita, which asked Polish economists about their favourites ahead of the announcement. The laureates will be named on Monday.
Source: WNP.PL, Photo: Bumble Dee / Shutterstock
