Machine Learning and Ensemble Methods

Editorial

To explore the relation between early career performance or recognition and receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, we compare winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, the most prestigious early career recognition for economists, with other successful scholars. The initial comparison combines JBCM winners with scholars published in leading economics journals, controlling for educational background (institution conferring the Ph.D.) and publication and citation success. We then narrow the comparison group down to those given relatively early recognition (based on age category) in the form of other major awards. Lastly, we compare the JBCM awardees with synthetic counterfactuals that best resemble their pre-award academic career performance. All three analyses provide strong support for the notion that winning the JBCM is related to receiving the Nobel Prize, the award of which is also correlated with early career performance success as measured by number of publications and citations.

The Matthew effect has become a standard concept in science studies and beyond to describe processes of cumulative advantage. Despite its wide success, a rigorous quantitative analysis for Merton’s original case for Matthew effects—the Nobel Prize—is still missing. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the causal effect of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (hereafter the Nobel Prize in Economics). Furthermore, we test another of Merton’s ideas: successful papers can draw attention to cited references, leading to a serial diffusion of ideas. Based on the complete Web of Science 1900–2011, we estimate the causal effects of Nobel Prizes compared to a synthetic control group which we constructed by combining different matching techniques. We find clear evidence for a Matthew effect upon citation impacts, especially for papers published within 5 years before the award. Further, scholars from the focal field of the award are particularly receptive to the award signal. In contrast to that, we find no evidence that the Nobel Prize causes a serial diffusion of ideas. Papers cited by future Nobel laureates do not gain in citation impact after the award.

Nobel begets Nobel in economics

Chinese economists produce large and increasingly high-quality research output, yet they have not been considered for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Prevailing explanations, cultural bias or insufficient theoretical depth, rely on general assumptions. We integrate Bourdieu’s field theory and Merton’s normative structure of science to operationalize three Nobel-alignment dimensions: Nobel Query (NQ), Nobel Context (NC), and Nobel Time (NT). Using textual and metadata evidence from 2,604 articles in the Economic Research Journal (2000–2019), top in China and representative of the trend, we analyze the question types, levels of analysis, and timeline. Results show that applied “how” questions and domestically bounded contexts (firm/industry/national) dominate in those empirical studies. Despite strong empirical sophistication, Nobel-style inquiries are concentrated in a small set of subfields—especially econometrics, institutional economics, and financial economics. The timeline suggests a gradual convergence towards the Nobel Prize criteria since 2013. These patterns suggest that under-recognition reflects not only external gatekeeping but also internal research orientations that shape symbolic visibility. The NQ–NC–NT framework clarifies where convergence is occurring and identifies levers for translating policy relevance into generalizable contributions and for building international scholarly capital, with implications for journal strategy, collaboration networks, and training that privileges abstraction.

Herbert A. Simon, 1916-2001

The Nobel Prize in Economics celebrates decades of research in specific fields that have helped to improve the fundamental understanding of the subject and in many cases led to applications for attaining superior conditions of life. Since many parallel ideas emerge during the course of research, the relevance and criticality of these in addressing core concerns of the human being and the nature gets prominence for the award of the greatest accolade. Understanding sources of financial crisis and policies to lessen its impacts is a natural candidate for Nobel Prize, as has been the case for the award in 2022.

The paper presents the Chicago School economist Theodore Schultz's contributions to economic theory. Schultz is the only agricultural economist to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. The first part briefly describes the life of Theodore Schultz. The second part deals with his works in the economics of agriculture. The third part discusses his book The Economic Value of Education (Schultz, 1963). The fourth part analyses his work Investing in People (Schultz, 1981). The fifth part explores the book The Economics of Being Poor (Schultz, 1993). The sixth part outlines the book Origin of Increasing Returns (Schultz, 1993). The seventh part discusses his Nobel Prize lecture.

Inter-American Development Bank* Professor Bilkey's paper on the use of psychological analytical methods in economics warrants taking a look at the relationship between economics and psychology, and perhaps also at the relationship between economics and sociology and the social sciences in general. Within the last three decades, economics has incorporated mathematical methods into its methodology creating a new branch within the discipline known as econometrics. The award of the first Nobel Prize in economics in 1969 to two econometricians appears to pay tribute to this innovation in eco? nomic methodology, recognizing it as an important scientific achievement making economics more useful to human society. If economics can also incorporate psychological methods to achieve a similar end, creating a new branch within the discipline that could perhaps become known, to coin a term, as econopsychology, this could further increase its usefulness. From this vantage point, any effort to effect a methodological innovation in economics merits the most serious consideration and enthusiastic encouragement. I hold that economics can only gain from a closer relationship with the other social sciences, because this will make it possible for the economic discipline to represent natural events and occurrences contributing to economic and social change more realistically. To quote R?ssel L. Ackoff: must stop acting as though nature were organized into disciplines in the same way that universities are. Real life is a fusion of elements of all disciplines and this appears to call for a closer relationship among the social sciences and for giving them a larger role within economics. We may ask what is the present relationship between economics, psy? chology and sociology, and find that, due to increased specialization, economics, psychology, and sociology have grown further apart, rather than closer together, since the turn of the century. Their methodologies remain essentially incompatible, because economics is largely quantitative, while psychology is largely qualitative. Economics is rigorous in its de? ductions. Social theory, on the other hand, is largely devoid of normative assumptions. It assumes that the more two people are alike, the more they will behave alike. Social theory is largely inductive. Psychology is

Decision Economics, In Commemoration of the Birth Centennial of Herbert A. Simon 1916-2016 (Nobel Prize in Economics 1978)

In 2022, the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded jointly to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig, for their research on the financial system that shed light on the reasons for, and the consequences of, bank panics. Diamond and Dybvig showed that the banking system provides socially useful services through maturity transformation and delegated monitoring, and they also pointed out that maturity transformation made the banking system fundamentally vulnerable, which, if left unregulated, may experience bank panics. Bernanke demonstrated the macroeconomic significance of the banking system and analysed the negative macroeconomic impact of bank panics. Their research helped lay the foundations of a regulatory environment that fosters the efficient functioning of the financial system without bank panics.

In this chapter, a risk-free asset is added to the set of investable securities and the optimal portfolios are now derived in this augmented economy. One of the results obtained is that, in the risk/return analysis, the parameters (σ, m) of any investment portfolio lay either on or inside a certain cone \(\mathcal {C}(\sigma , m)\). The upper side of the cone represents the efficient investment portfolios and is called the Capital Market Line. We show that the portfolios on the Capital Market Line can be built as an allocation between the risk-free asset and a particular investment portfolio, made of risky assets only, called the Tangent Portfolio. The Tangent Portfolio appears to define the tangent point between the cone \(\mathcal {C}(\sigma , m)\) and the hyperbola \(\mathcal {F}(\sigma , m)\) delimiting the (σ, m) of all investment portfolios made of risky assets only. Based on some economic reasoning, the Tangent Portfolio is sometimes assimilated to the Market Portfolio, for which the investment in each asset is proportional to its relative market capitalisation. We also show in this chapter that the problem of optimal allocation can be segmented into two steps. First, the investor decides on the risk exposure he is ready to take, secondly, he calculates the allocation to the Tangent Portfolio which gives him this level of risk (the rest of the money being invested in the risk-free asset). This paradigm for investing is known as the Separation Theorem of James Tobin (Nobel Prize in Economics in 1981, see Tobin) and shows that whatever the risk appetite is, there is only one way to take risk exposure efficiently.

Most economists who are familiar with the works of George Shackle probably view him primarily as someone who combined elements from, and contributed to, Austrian and Post Keynesian approaches to economics. In this chapter, however, we cast him in a different role, that of a pioneer in behavioural economics. As is evident from Earl (ed.) (1988), Sent (2004) and Tomer (2007), behavioural economics takes many forms but may be generally thought of as using knowledge of how people actually make decisions, and of actual business practices, as foundations for economic analysis and policy. Economists sometimes gather the knowledge that provides the foundations for behavioural economics themselves, via questionnaires, in-depth case studies and experiments. Some, including Shackle, also engage in intense introspection on the nature of the human condition and how people deal with the challenges of everyday life. But many of the underpinnings of behavioural economics have come from social and cognitive sciences, particular from various branches of psychology. Indeed, though the frequently renamed prize that is popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded twice for contributions to behavioural economics, in neither case did the recipient hold an academic affiliation as an economist: the 1978 recipient, Herbert Simon, a remarkable polymath, was a professor of computing science and psychology, while Daniel Kahneman, who shared the 2002 Prize with experimental economist Vernon Smith, is a professor of psychology.

It is 50 years since the first Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch. This article analyzes the collaborations between these pioneers of econometrics which spanned four decades and various subfields in economics, based on records of their correspondence. It is demonstrated that, while Frisch was largely responsible for theoretical breakthroughs, Tinbergen was responsible for making them public and popularizing them. This is especially relevant for understanding the development of econometric models in the 1950s, decision models of the 1950s, and subsequent work on utility measurement. This division of labor is analyzed in relation to the goals they pursued in their research and their respective perfectionistic (Frisch) and pragmatic (Tinbergen) approaches to economic science. Both men shared a sense of deep social responsibility, but differences in their personalities and approaches to science generated important differences in scientific recognition and policy influence. Although they are both widely remembered for helping to turn economics into a quantitative empirical science, this article shows that they were motivated by separate personal and political goals which shaped their scientific approaches.

This paper takes its point of departure in recent literature around the Mont Pèlerin Society and the construction of the new Nobel Prize in economics, which was awarded to Milton Friedman in 1976. By following the reception of Friedman’s Prize in the Swedish debate, I argue that neoliberalism in Sweden was not a product of transnational circulation, but of endogenous debate and dissident economists in the mature social democrat welfare state. In the final section, I discuss the difference between social democracy and neoliberalism as ideal type construction and as empirical phenomenon, and I suggest that once the central idea of a social form of democracy was lost, social democracy could become neoliberal.