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A Nobel for Innovation: Mokyr, Aghion, Howitt
Oct 14, 2025 · original
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
Who Got What, and Why? A Nobel for Claudia Goldin
Oct 9, 2023 · original
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 cliometrics, the combined tools of economics and history, to understand changes in the wages of women and men, of the less- and more-educated, of the part-time worker and late-night-at-the-office striver. This history is backward-looking in its evidence, but not in its usefulness. Goldin’s work helps us understand whose wages will rise, will fall, will equalize going forward. Not entirely unfairly, she will be described in much of today’s coverage as an economist who studies the gender gap. This description misses two critical pieces. The question of female wages is a direct impli
Statistics for Strategic Scientists – A Clark for Isaiah Andrews
Apr 20, 2021 · original
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 on his work on what you might call “strategic statistics”. To understand what we mean by that term, we need to first detour a bit and understand what econometrics is anyway. The great Joseph Schumpeter, in a beautiful short introduction to the new Econometric Society in 1933, argues that economics is not only the most mathematical of the social or moral sciences, but of all sciences. How can that be? Concepts in physics like mass or velocity are surely quantitative, but must be measured before we can put some number of them. However, concepts in economics ar
Operations Research and the Rise of Applied Game Theory – A Nobel for Milgrom and Wilson
Oct 12, 2020 · original
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. The famed book by von Neumann and Morganstern was published in 1944, and widely reviewed as one of the most important social scientific works of the century. And yet, it would be three decades before applications of game theory revolutionized antitrust, organizational policy, political theory, trade, finance, and more. Alongside the “credibility revolution” of causal econometrics, and to a lesser extent behavioral economics, applied game theory has been the most important development in economics in the past half century. The prize to Milgrom and Wilson is likely
Alberto Alesina and Oliver Williamson: Taking Political and Economic Frictions Seriously
May 24, 2020 · original
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 is most famous for the microeconomics of the firm, and the other for political economy, there is in fact a tight link between their research agendas. They have attempted to open “black boxes” in economic modeling – about why firms organize the way they do, and the nature of political constraints on economic activity – to clarify otherwise strange differences in how firms and governments behave. First, let us discuss Oliver Williamson , the 2009 Nobel winner (alongside Elinor Ostrom), and student of Ken Arrow and later the Carnegie School . He grew up in Superior, Wisconsin, next to Duluth at
Covid-19 Innovation – Are We on the Right Track?
May 19, 2020 · original
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 Jorge Lemus , Guillermo Marshall and I have developed about Covid-19 innovation. Many of us in the innovation economics world have been asked by governments how they should handle R&D right now. The basic problem is clear. There is a pandemic. Stopping this has enormous economic benefits – a vaccine that arrived tomorrow would literally be among the most economically valuable inventions ever made. Treatments which allow normal economic activity are incredibly valuable as well. As always, governments have limited knowledge about who is able to invent what. There is tremendous uncertainty about how var
The Simple Economics of Social Distancing and the Coronavirus
Mar 13, 2020 · original
“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 are needed and where they aren’t. Second, economists are used to thinking through tradeoffs, such as the relative cost and benefit of shutting down schools versus the economic consequences of doing so. The most straightforward epidemiological model of infection – the SIR model dating back to the 1920s – is actually quite commonly used in economic models of innovation or information diffusion, so it is one we are often quite familiar with. Let’s walk through the simple economics of epidemic policy. We’ll start with three as
What Randomization Can and Cannot Do: The 2019 Nobel Prize
Oct 17, 2019 · original
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 writeup this year has been delayed due to the anti-government road blockades here in Ecuador which delayed my return to the internet-enabled world – developing countries face many barriers to reaching prosperity, and rarely have I been so personally aware of the effects of place on productivity as I was this week! The reason for the prize is straightforward: an entire branch of economics, development, looks absolutely different from what it looked like thirty years ago. Development used to be essentially a branch of economic growth. Researchers stu
The Price of Everything, the Value of the Economy: A Clark Medal for Emi Nakamura!
May 1, 2019 · original
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 the Eurozone, the “savings glut” and its effect on interest rates, the change in openness to hot financial flows: it has been a wild twenty years for the macroeconomy in the two decades since Andrei Schleifer won the Clark. It’s hard to imagine what could be more important for an economist to understand than these patterns. Something unusual has happened in macroeconomics over the past twenty years: it has become more like Industrial Organization! A brief history may be useful. The term macroeconomics is due to Ragnar Frisch, in his 1933 article on th
How We Create and Destroy Growth: A Nobel for Romer and Nordhaus
Oct 8, 2018 · original
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 that the prize went to both men together: Nordhaus is best known for his environmental economics, and Romer for his theory of “endogenous” growth. On reflection, the connection between their work is obvious. But it is the connection that makes clear how inaccurate many of today’s headlines – “an economic prize for climate change” – really is. Because it is not the climate that both winners build on, but rather a more fundamental economic question: economic growth. Why are some places and times rich and others poor? And what is the impact of these differe

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