London: Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.
“The laureates’ model for explaining the circumstances under which political institutions are formed and changed has three components. The first is a conflict over how resources are allocated and who holds decision-making power in a society (the elite or the masses). The second is that the masses sometimes have the opportunity to exercise power by mobilising and threatening the ruling elite; power in a society is thus more than the power to make decisions. The third is the commitment problem, which means that the only alternative is for the elite to hand over decision-making power to the populace,” the Nobel Prize organisation said in a post on X.
Acemoglu, Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, was born 1967 in Istanbul. He was awarded PhD from London School of Economics and Political Science in 1992.
Johnson, also Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was born in 1963 in Sheffield, UK. He completed his PhD in 1989 from MIT.
Robinson, is Professor at University of Chicago, USA. Born in 1960, he was awarded PhD in 1993 from Yale University, USA.
Last year, Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin became only the third woman among the 93 Economics laureates. She was honoured for her research on why women around the world are less likely than men to work and why they earn less money when they do.
Last week, Nobel honours were announced in Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Peace.
All the winners will be presented the awards on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.