Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: American economic historian and labor economist Claudia Goldwin won the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2023, the media reported on Monday.
She won it for “having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
The prestigious award, formally known as the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” is the last of this year’s crop of Nobel Prizes and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns (USD 999,137).
The other Nobel Prizes this year, announced last week, have gone to COVID-19 vaccine discoveries, atomic snapshots, and “quantum dots” as well as to a Norwegian dramatist and an Iranian woman human rights activist.
The Economics Prize is not one of the original prizes for science, literature, and peace created by the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, but was established and funded by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.
The first economics prize was awarded in 1969. The past winners include influential thinkers and academics like Friedrich August von Hayek, Amartya Sen, Milton Friedman, and US economist Paul Krugman.
In 2022, a trio of US economists including former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke won the Prize for their research on how regulating banks and propping up failing lenders with public cash can stave off an even deeper economic crisis, like the Great Depression of the 1930s.