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Two months ago I was standing in Stockholm’s Stadshuset (City Hall). Soon, Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims will be there as well. The pair, however, will be accepting the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Although I am not a macroeconomist myself, Marginal Revolution has a good description of the pair.
My old professor, Jim Hamilton of UCSD explains macroeconomic impulse response functions which Sims helped develop.
Tags: Christopher Sims, Economics, Macroeconomics, Nobel Prize, Sargent, Sims, Thomas Sargent, VAR
From the Nobel press release:
On many markets, buyers and sellers do not always make contact with one another immediately. This concerns, for example, employers who are looking for employees and workers who are trying to find jobs. Since the search process requires time and resources, it creates frictions in the market. On such search markets, the demands of some buyers will not be met, while some sellers cannot sell as much as they would wish. Simultaneously, there are both job vacancies and unemployment on the labor market.
This year’s three Laureates have formulated a theoretical framework for search markets…The Laureates’ models help us understand the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies, and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy. This may refer to benefit levels in unemployment insurance or rules in regard to hiring and firing. One conclusion is that more generous unemployment benefits give rise to higher unemployment and longer search times.
Media coverage here, here, here, and here.
Tyler Cowen has more detailed profiles of the three laureates: Diamond, Mortensen, and Pissarides.
Tags: Nobel Prize
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Robert G. Edwards, the inventor of in vitro fertilization (IVF). According to the Nobel Prize press release:
“Robert Edwards is awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for the development of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) therapy. His achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition afflicting a large proportion of humanity including more than 10% of all couples worldwide.
As early as the 1950s, Edwards had the vision that IVF could be useful as a treatment for infertility. He worked systematically to realize his goal, discovered important principles for human fertilization, and succeeded in accomplishing fertilization of human egg cells in test tubes (or more precisely, cell culture dishes). His efforts were finally crowned by success on 25 July, 1978, when the world’s first “test tube baby” was born. During the following years, Edwards and his co-workers refined IVF technology and shared it with colleagues around the world.
Approximately four million individuals have so far been born following IVF. Many of them are now adult and some have already become parents. A new field of medicine has emerged, with Robert Edwards leading the process all the way from the fundamental discoveries to the current, successful IVF therapy. His contributions represent a milestone in the development of modern medicine.”
Additional coverage can be found: here, here and here. Also:
Tags: Nobel Prize
Today, Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University and Oliver E. Williamson of the University of California, Berkeley won the Nobel prize in Economics. Dr. Ostrom won “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons” and Dr. Williamson “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm.”
According to the N.Y. Times:
The prize committee, in making the awards, seemed to be influenced by the credit crisis and the severe recession that in the minds of many mainstream economists has highlighted the shortcomings of a unregulated marketplace, in which “economic actors,”left to their own devices, will act in their own self-interests and in doing so, will enhance everyone’s well-being. The committee, in effect, said that theory was too simplistic and ignored the unstated relationships and behaviors that develop among companies that are competitors but find ways to resolve common problems. “Both scholars have greatly enhanced our understanding of non-market institutions” other than government, the committee said.
“Basically there is a common understanding that develops even among competitors when they are dealing with each other,” Mr. Shiller said, adding “when people make business contact, even competitors, they can’t anticipate everything, so an element of trust comes in.”
More details on the Nobel laureates, see the NobelPrize.org.
Tyler Cowen gives a nice example of Dr. Williamson’s work in practice:
“Let’s say you privatize a water system in Africa and write a 30-year contract with a private French company to run the thing. As the contract nears its end, and if renewal is not obvious, the company has an incentive to “asset strip,” or at the very least not maintain the value of the pipes. Alternatively, the government might signal, in advance, that it has every intention of renewing the contract. The company then has the incentive to lower quality to consumers, since it expects renewal a and faces weaker competitive constraints.”
Marketplace has an interview with Dr. Williamson who reveals one of the most important benefits of a Nobel prize: a free university parking space.
Tags: Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Elizabeth Blackburn from the University of California, San Francisco, Jack Szostak from Harvard Medical School and Carol Greider from Johns Hopkins University. The nobel prize was awarded “for work on the existence and nature of telomerase, an enzyme that helps prevent the fraying of chromosomes and is core to new work on ageing and cancer.” More details on the prize and a biography of each of the winners can be found here.
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The 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to three European researchers who discovered viruses that cause cervical cancer and AIDS.
German virologist Harald zur Hausen discovered that HPV causes cervical cancer. This discovery eventually lead to the creation of the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer.
Two French virologists, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, shared the other half of the award for discovering H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
The Nobel Foundation has complete coverage of the awards.
Tags: Medicine, Nobel Prize
The winners of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics are: Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson. The trio won the prize for their work on Mechanism Design. See the Nobel Prize press release as well as the Scientific Background paper detailing exactly what is mechanism design.
The Economist’s View website provides a number of links to newspaper articles and blog posts regarding the 2007 Economics Nobel prize. “Mechanism Design for Grandma” on the Marginal Revolution site gives a simple explanation of Mechanism Design Theory.
As an Applied Microeconomist who is generally skeptically of the practical importance of much of economic theory, I find Tyler Cowen’s post on the Marginal Revolution website particularly interesting:
No doubt mechanism design, and the general problem of inducing truth-telling, will be with us forever. But how practical are these general results? Or have the theorists simply provided us with cautionary notes and left the real applications to the context-specific world of practice? Did these guys get at the real reasons why we don’t organize the entire economy as a second-price auction?
Part of me thinks: “Hey, let’s say Natasha wants Yana to tell her the truth about when she will clean her room. This stuff isn’t useful!”
Another part of me thinks: “It is most important to get theory right. These guys are brilliant. Only the philistines demand that all scientific contributions have immediate applications.”
Some of you might argue: “These guys have already had a big impact on real world auctions and incentive schemes.” In terms of the induced improvement in human welfare, I find that a difficult case to make. The important progress has come from recognizing much simpler truths about incentives.
Tags: Mechanism Design, Nobel Prize
The work of three researchers who developed the procedure of gene targeting have won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine. The winners are:
Further coverage is available at:
Tags: Gene Targeting, Medicine, Nobel Prize
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