Social Science Space

Two academics who have integrated what might have once seemed like non-economic externalities into economic models have been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics. The winners are William D. Nordhaus of Yale University, cited for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis, and Paul M. Romer of New York University’s Stern School of Business, cited doing the same with technological innovations.

Richard Thaler was not the first proponent of behavioral economics to be awarded a Nobel Prize, notes Sergey Popov. But Thaler’s star turn came when the Great Recession and it orgy or irrationality brought a lot of attention to research that extensively cites the University of Chicago’s economist’s 40-year-long academic career.

Richard H. Thaler, the University of Chicago economist whose contributions linking psychology to the ‘dismal science’ caught the public’s eye in his co-authored bestselling book Nudge, has received this year’s Nobel Prize in economic sciences.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Nobel laureate economist Al Roth explains to interview David Edmonds some of the ins and outs of market matching, giving a wealth of real-world examples.

As technology improves and organizations become more complex, the theory and practice of contract design will only increase in importance. As such, we owe, we owe a great debt to this year’s Nobel laureates in economics for giving us powerful tools to structure effective contracts.

Angus Deaton called for the applied microeconomists not to abandon economic theory in favor of experiments but instead to think more deeply about the consequences of economic theories and how they can be tested using real-world data. This is the approach he has followed throughout his career and what has led to him win a Nobel Prize.

The Nobel committee has awarded Princeton’s Angus Deaton ‘for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.’ But in fact, he was awarded for building bridges – between disciplines, between theory and reality, between people.

This year’s winner of the not-quite Nobel Prize in economics once again demonstrates the triumph of the blackboard over the real world in what gets recognized — and that’s not good, argues David Spencer.

How do we understand and regulate industries where there are only a few powerful firms? French economist Jean Tirole, for one, asked such a question and his answers earned him a Nobel this morning.

As part of a series of occasional interviews with leading social scientists, Elinor Ostrom spoke to socialsciencespace. In 2009, she […]