Dear All:

The Nobel prize for economic sciences for 2002 will be announced in the next few weeks. Every year, I take a bit of pleasure out of guessing who will win it.

Last year, I was fortunate to guess the winners, which included Prof. Joe Stiglitz, who worked closely with the FOLIOfn Research group. That was quite cool. He did us the favor of coming to FOLIO and answering employee questions about his victory.

So who will win this year? I really don’t have a good sense, but I think it may be in one of the following fields: public finance, experimental economics, or contract theory. Or it just might be someone who did a lot of stuff, like Dale Jorgenson of Harvard. They could give it to 2 econometricians that are very, very old. Clive Granger and Gregory Chow. They could also do a finance job and lay it with Eugene Fama of Chicago (for data mining).

My votes (in ranked order) are :
1. Public Finance [Peter Diamond of MIT and Martin Feldstein of Harvard]
2. Experimental Economics [Charles Plott of California Institute of Tech and Vernon Smith of George Mason]
3. Clive Granger of UC San Diego and Greg Chow for Time Series econometrics.
4. Contract Theory [Oliver Hart of Harvard and Paul Milgrom of Stanford]
5. Dale Jorgenson of Harvard, for everything else.
6. Eugene Fama of Chicago for data mining.

Note: Jerry Hausman could be thrown in with [1] or [3].

If anyone wishes to send their guesses, please do so!

Enjoy!
Ludwig
October 2, 2002