by Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, speaks during the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association and the Association of Allied Social Sciences on Friday, Jan. 4, 2019. Bernanke is one of three winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics.
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US-based economists Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig have been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in economics for their research on banks and financial crises.
Bernanke was chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014 and is now at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC Diamond is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Dybvig is a professor at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis .
The Nobel committee said their work in the early 1980s “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises”, and showed why it was vital to avoid bank failures. They added that this was “invaluable” during the 2008-09 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic.
Bernanke’s analysis of the Great Depression in the 1930s showed how and why bank defaults were a major reason the crisis was so long and severe. Diamond and Dybvig’s work, meanwhile, looked at the socially important role banks play in smoothing the potential conflict between savers who want access to their money and the economy that needs savings for investment. and how governments can help prevent bank runs by providing deposit insurance and acting as a lender of last resort.
Winners of the award – officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel – receive 10 million Swedish kroner ($883,000) each.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences selects the winners from a list of nominees recommended by the Economics Prize Committee. This makes its selection from names submitted by approximately 3,000 professors, past winners and academy members by invitation. People cannot nominate themselves.
Last year, the economics prize was split three ways. It went to David Card, for his work on labor economics. and Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens for their contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.
Unlike the other five Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded since 1901 and are awarded in the will of Swedish inventor, chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel, the economics prize was established in 1969 by the central bank of Sweden in his honor. It is the last one that is announced every year.
The prestigious Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to Belarusian human rights activist Ales Byliatsky, the Russian human rights organization Memorial and the Ukrainian NGO Center for Civil Liberties.
This year’s physics prize went to Alain Aspect, John Francis Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, for discoveries in quantum mechanics. The Nobel committee said it used “pioneering experiments” investigating particles in entangled states to usher in a new era of quantum technology.
The chemistry award was shared between Carolyn R. Bertozzi, for her work using click and bioorthogonal chemistry to map cells and develop more targeted cancer therapies. and Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless, who according to the committee “laid the foundations of click chemistry,” which involves linking biocompatible molecules.
The medicine prize was awarded to Svante Paabo “for his discoveries about the genome of extinct hominins and human evolution”.
The literary prize was won by the French writer Annie Ernaux.
