A Nobel for Innovation: Mokyr, Aghion, Howitt
This site is currently inactive; however, an A Fine Theorem post about the 2025 Nobel can be found on my personal site at https://kevinbryanecon.com/mokyraghionhowitt.html
A Fine Theorem
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Who Got What, and Why? A Nobel for Claudia Goldin
How have women been paid for their work? More broadly, how are different skills in general rewarded in the labor market? The prices of different things are at the core of economics, and wages that is, the price of labor are the most important prices. Claudia Goldin, 2023 s Nobel Laureate in Economics, uses [ ]
Statistics for Strategic Scientists – A Clark for Isaiah Andrews
Today s 2021 Clark Medal goes to the Harvard econometrician Isaiah Andrews, and no surprise. Few young econometricians have produced such a volume of work so quickly. And while Andrews has a number of papers on traditional econometric topics how to do high-powered inference on non-linear models, for instance I want to focus here [ ]
Operations Research and the Rise of Applied Game Theory – A Nobel for Milgrom and Wilson
Today s Nobel Prize to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson is the capstone of an incredibly fruitful research line which began in the 1970s in a few small departments of Operations Research. Game theory, or the mathematical study of strategic interaction, dates back to work by Zermelo, Borel and von Neumann in the early 20th century. [ ]
Alberto Alesina and Oliver Williamson: Taking Political and Economic Frictions Seriously
Very sad news this week for the economics community: both Oliver Williamson and Alberto Alesina have passed away. Williamson has been in poor health for some time, but Alesina s death is a greater shock: he apparently had a heart attack while on a hike with his wife, at the young age of 63. While one [ ]
Covid-19 Innovation – Are We on the Right Track?
I never discuss my own research on this website it s more fun (for me at the very least!) to dive in to the great results the rest of the economics community produces. So I hope you ll forgive me for breaking this rule today, as I want to show a few interesting, very time-sensitive results [ ]
The Simple Economics of Social Distancing and the Coronavirus
Social distancing reducing the number of daily close contacts individuals have is being encouraged by policymakers and epidemiologists. Why it works, and why now rather than for other diseases, is often left unstated. Economists have two important contributions here. First, game theoretic models of behavior are great for thinking through where government mandates [ ]
What Randomization Can and Cannot Do: The 2019 Nobel Prize
It is Nobel Prize season once again, a grand opportunity to dive into some of our field s most influential papers and to consider their legacy. This year s prize was inevitable, an award to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for popularizing the hugely influential experimental approach to development. It is only fitting that my [ ]
The Price of Everything, the Value of the Economy: A Clark Medal for Emi Nakamura!
Fantastic and well-deserved news this morning with the Clark Medal being awarded to Emi Nakamura, who has recently moved from Columbia to Berkeley. Incredibly, Nakamura s award is the first Clark to go to a macroeconomist in the 21st century. The Great Recession, the massive changes in global trade patterns, the rise of monetary areas like [ ]
How We Create and Destroy Growth: A Nobel for Romer and Nordhaus
Occasionally, the Nobel Committee gives a prize which is unexpected, surprising, yet deft in how it points out underappreciated research. This year, they did no such thing. Both William Nordhaus and Paul Romer have been running favorites for years in my Nobel betting pool with friends at the Federal Reserve. The surprise, if anything, is [ ]