Saturday, October 12, 2013

Thoughts on the Nobel

In 2010 I correctly predicted Pissarides and Mortensen as the Nobel winners (which was particularly exciting because I wasn't seeing anyone else mentioning them but me). I have not been able to reproduce the feat, but in hopes of another correct call I'll offer some thoughts of who I think would be particularly deserving.

I would like to see (and I think there's a fair chance at it) a microeconometrics prize for Angrist, Card, and Krueger. This is not as anomalous a prediction as Pissarides/Mortensen - many people have been mentioning it. The fact is, microeconometrics has undergone an enormous revolution over the last twenty-five years but this area hasn't been recognized with a prize since 2000. That prize was awarded for work done many decades earlier on selection and discrete choice.

Those are very old problems.

In the ensuing decades much of the progress has been in dealing with endogeneity and a lot of the work in that area is attributable to Angrist, Card, and Krueger.

Since the Heckman/McFadden prize of 2000 we've had two prizes for empirical macroeconometrics. Some people are talking about a Hendry, Pesaran, and Phillips prize but I really can't see how another macroeconometrics prize can be justified before catching up with the backlog in recognition for microeconometrics.

So that is both my hope and prediction.

The other one you hear a lot is Romer. As readers probably know I'd love to see that as well. In fact I'd like to see Barro-Romer, both because Barro deserves one and he contributed to this literature, and also because if he gets the prize for endogenous growth then he doesn't need to get explicitly recognized for his fiscal policy and Ricardian equivalence work!

Of course Barro could deserve a prize on his own for rational expectations, but the political fallout of that could be nicely avoided by giving him his deserved Nobel for work outside of short-run macro :)

2 comments:

  1. Agreed totally about the prize going to econometricians. I bet on Hausman in our department's betting pool, though. In some sense, choosing Angrist/Card/Krueger is a sort of turning point for the Nobel, since they'd be the first solid micro empiricists to win it in the modern era. (Heckman is obviously an empiricist, too, but his prize was really for econometric theory, I think) Once they're given the prize, it really opens the floodgates for empirical contenders.

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  2. I would rather have an Angrist/Card/Krueger award or a Peltzman/Posner award than a Hendry/Pesaran/Phillips award because I feel that the first two have more substance and the implications of their research are more easily transferrable to practice than the latter, but I might be wrong about that point as I'm not deeply familiar with current research in econometrics.

    Here's the 2013 prediction list from ScienceWatch:

    http://sciencewatch.com/nobel/2013-predictions

    And Daniel Kuehn, you know where I stand on my choice, even though it's very unlikely he'll get it at this rate of things...

    http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/75/4/643.abstract

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815340222/

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