Who will win Monday’s Nobel Prize in economic science?

From the WSJ:

Clarivate Analytics, formerly a unit of Thomson Reuters, maintains a list of possible Nobel Prize winners based on research citations. New additions to its list this year were Colin Camerer of the California Institute of Technology and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University (“for pioneering research in behavioral economics and in neuroeconomics”); Robert Hall of Stanford University (“for his analysis of worker productivity and studies of recessions and unemployment”); and Michael Jensen of Harvard, Stewart Myers of MIT and Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago (“for their contributions illuminating the dimensions of decisions in corporate finance”).

Dozens of additional names appear on Clarivate’s list of possible future economics winners, including prominent figures on the American economics scene like Stanford’s John Taylor, a monetary-policy scholar who President Donald Trump is said to be considering for Federal Reserve chairman; Paul Romer of New York University, an expert on economic growth and the chief economist at the World Bank; Martin Feldstein of Harvard, who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Ronald Reagan and has studied pensions, taxation and other topics in public finance; William Nordhaus of Yale University, who has studied climate change; Dale Jorgenson of Harvard, who has studied productivity; Robert Barro of Harvard, who has researched economic growth; Oliver Blanchard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the former top economist at the International Monetary Fund; and Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, who has studied behavioral economics.

Former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s name has been floated in the past, given his academic work on the Great Depression, and his longtime collaborator Mark Gertler of NYU appears on the Clarivate list.  So does Richard Posner, the recently retired federal judge who has written on the intersection of law and economics.

I’ve never once been right, but this year I’ll predict William Nordhaus (“Green Accounting”) and Martin Weitzman (climate change and economics of risk).

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