Thomas Sargent has shown how structural macroeconometrics can be used to analyze permanent changes in economic policy. This method can be applied to study macroeconomic relationships when households and firms adjust their expectations concurrently with economic developments. Sargent has examined, for instance, the post-World War II era, when many countries initially tended to implement a high-inflation policy, but eventually introduced systematic changes in economic policy and reverted to a lower inflation rate.

Christopher Sims has developed a method based on so-called vector autoregression to analyze how the economy is affected by temporary changes in economic policy and other factors. Sims and other researchers have applied this method to examine, for instance, the effects of an increase in the interest rate set by a central bank. It usually takes one or two years for the inflation rate to decrease, whereas economic growth declines gradually already in the short run and does not revert to its normal development until after a couple of years.

Er det et godt valg? Omend det er sikkert og ukontroversielt – ingen af de to har nogen stærk ideologisk profil som f.eks. en Robert Barro – er det utvivlsomt fuldt fortjent, at Sargent og Sims deler prisen. Det er også rettidigt. Uden Sims VAR-framework ville en evaluering af effekterne af kortsigtspolitik være lige så meget gætværk som for 40 år siden. Og uden Sargents indsigter i langsigtskonsekvenser af forhold som pengepolitiske regler osv. ville vi være mere på Herrens mark når vi talte strukturpolitik. Tillykke til de to!

Først har Thomson-Reuters (delvis på basis af citationstal) givet følgende bud:

• Douglas W. Diamond (Booth School, Chicago), for sin analyse af finansiel intermediation og monitorering.
  Jerry A. Hausman (MIT) og Halbert L. White, Jr. (University of California San Diego, La Jolla), for deres bidrag til økonometri, særligt Hausmans specifikationstest og White’s standardfejl (heteroskedasticitet).
• Anne O. Krueger (Johns Hopkins) og Gordon Tullock (George Mason) for deres beskrivelse og analyse af rent-seeking.

Mostly Economics leverer en række andre bud:

• Jagdish Bhagwati (Columbia) og Avinash Dixit (Princeton) for international handelsteori
• Robert Barro (Harvard) og Paul Romer (Stanford) for deres bidrag til vækststudier
• Oliver Hart (Harvard) for transaktionsøkonomi
• William Nordhaus (Yale) og Martin Weitzman (Harvard) for deres bidrag til miljøøkonomi
• Eugene Fama (Booth School, Chicago) og Kenneth French (Dartmouth) for finansiel økonomi
• Robert Shiller (Yale) og Richard Thaler (Booth School, Chicago) for adfærdsøkonomi

Mine personlige favoritter – ikke fordi jeg mener, at de er de mest sandsynlige, men fordi de i den grad fortjener den – er enten en pris delt mellem Krueger og Tullock eller Robert Barro. Grunden er ret simpel: De har stået for gennembrud, der betyder noget for den måde vi ser verden på. Tullock og Krueger introducerede studiet af rent-seeking og dermed en analytisk måde at forholde sig til korruption, lobbyisme og særinteressepolitik. Barro, der tidligere også har bidraget signifikant til politisk økonomi, startede hele den nye forskning i økonomiske vækstprocesser, der bl.a. har demonstreret værdien af gode institutioner og frihandel. Hvis den slags ikke er en Nobelpris værd?

Why are so many people unemployed at the same time that there are a large number of job openings? How can economic policy affect unemployment? This year’s Laureates have developed a theory which can be used to answer these questions. This theory is also applicable to markets other than the labor market.

Årets pris gives dermed, meget apropos krisetider, til forskning i arbejdsløshed. Men hvor tidligere forskning så på arbejdsløsheden, ser Diamond, Mortenson og Pissarides på de bagvedliggende mekanikker: Hvorfor hyrer og fyrer arbejdsgivere, hvorfor taget arbejdstagere bestemte job og siger op på andre. Ved at se på hele denne dynamik får man en helt anden indsigt i jobskabelse og jobtab, to ting der hele tiden foregår. Man kan hermed også forstå, hvorfor arbejdsmarkedet aldrig clearer med det samme – der er omkostninger ved at søge. Og det gælder både for arbejdstagere, der tager tid om at finde et nyt job, der matcher deres evner og kompetencer, og arbejdsgivere, der søger efter kvalificerede medarbejdere. I hele menageriet spiller forhold som dagpengeperiode, hvor stor bistandshjælpen er osv. ind på folks incitamenter til at komme i gang med at søge.

Prisen er bestemt velfortjent, og meget aktuel. For mere information, her er Nobelpriskomiteens begrundelse, og her er Tyler Cowen om Chris Pissarides, Dale Mortensen, og Peter Diamond, og her er hans kollega Alex Tabarroks evaluering af prisen. Niclas Berggren har mere.

Men først lidt om, hvem der er i spil. I sæsonpremieren på The Simpsons fik Jagdish Bhagwati prisen, også selvom Lisa Simpsons kandidat er Elhanan Helpman (læs her). Begge er faktisk gode bud, selvom Helpman sandsynligvis skule dele en eventuel pris med Gene Grossman. Mostly Economics nævner miljøøkonomerne William Nordhaus og Martin Weitzman som gode og politiske korrekte bud. Samme side oplister Thompson Reuters bud: Alberto Alesina (primært politisk økonomi), Nobuhiro Kiyotaki og John Moore (konjunkturteori), og Kevin Murphy (primært arbejdsmarkedsøkonomi).

Andre mulige emner, der bestemt har gjort sig fortjente til prisen, er Ernst Fehr for sit pionerarbejde med adfærdsøkonomi, Eugene Fama og Kenneth French for teorien om efficiente markeder – også selvom den del af økonomi er stærkt upopulær i politiske cirkler for tiden – og Paul Romer for endogen vækstteori. Det er nærmest umuligt at give et klart bud i dette felt, og der er altid muligheden for, at komiteen finder en eller flere kandidater udenfor de åbenlyse kandidater. Sidst er mit personlige håb: Mit hjerte banker stadig for en pris til enten William Baumol for at bringe iværksættere tilbage i økonomisk teori og flere bidrag til public choice, og selvfølgelig Robert Barro for hans pionerarbejde i økonomisk vækstteori. Hvad mener vores læsere?

Once Obama won the primary, Krugman supported him. Obviously, any Democrat was better than John McCain.

“I was nervous until they finally called it on Election Night,” Krugman says. “We had an Election Night party at our house, thirty or forty people.”

“The econ department, the finance department, the Woodrow Wilson school,” Wells says. “They were all very nervous, so they were grateful we were having the party, because they didn’t want to be alone. We had two or three TVs set up and we had a little portable outside fire pit and we let people throw in an effigy or whatever they wanted to get rid of for the past eight years.”

“One of our Italian colleagues threw in an effigy of Berlusconi.”

“I put out some coloring paper and markers so that people could write stuff on it and throw it into the fire. People really felt like there was stuff they wanted to shed! I had little hats and party whistles.”

Bortset fra at jeg kunne have lyst til at vide, hvad Krugman-parret selv tegnede/skrev på det, de brændte af, så lad mig skynde mig at sige, at jeg formodentlig har begået min andel af barnagtige ting, også i mit voksenliv, og jeg kender bestemt til at blive bidt af begejstringen af at være blandt ligesindede (omend det så typisk snart efter giver mig en instinktiv lyst til at løbe skrigende bort).  Alligevel må jeg sige: Én af grundene (omend langt fra den vigtigste) til, at jeg har stor respekt for f.eks. Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Gary Becker, Douglass North, Robert Lucas, Elinor Ostrom m.fl. er, at jeg faktisk ikke kunne forestille mig nogen af disse, Krugmans forgængere som modtagere af Nobelprisen i økonomi, sammenkalde deres åndsfæller med henblik på at afbrænde billeder o.a. forestillende deres fælles, politiske modstandere.

Måske en mentalitetsforskel, måske en generationsforskel, måske en klasseforskel.  Ihvertfald et bevis på, at det at have en Nobel ikke er det samme som at være nobel.

PS.  Portrættet har iøvrigt denne fine lille passage, der nok antyder, at Krugman ikke er fri for selvironi og -kritik, men også viser, at man skal være forsigtig med at vurdere en (samfundsvidenskabelig) akademiker alene på mængden af “citations”

The most successful paper Krugman ever wrote was about target zones, and it was completely wrong. In the years before Europe adopted the euro, it was thought that establishing something between floating exchange rates and fixed ones—a “target zone” within which a currency would be allowed to float—might reap some of the advantages of each. He estimates that by the time the paper was officially published, in 1991, some hundred and fifty derivative papers had already appeared. “Empirically, it doesn’t work at all,” Krugman says. “People loved it as an academic thing, but it had some very strong predictions about interest rates inside target zones. Those predictions all turned out to be wrong. But nobody attacked me for that.”

“One of Adam Smith’s major contributions was the development of a theory of order that demonstrated the possibility of beneficial outcomes emerging from the independent contributions of many individuals pursuing their own interests within a set of agreed upon rules. Smith’s work provided the foundation for modern micro-economics that has formalized the theory of competitive markets. Individuals organize themselves into enterprises that seek out opportunities for gain through production and exchange. Competition among buyers and sellers exchanging purely private goods in an open market within a legal framework that defines and enforces property rights and contractual agreements, generates incentives that lead toward optimal results.

While each participant tries to maximize his or her own welfare, competition among producers and consumers of pure private goods leads to an increase in the benefits for all while driving individual advantage over others to a minimum. Public policies consistent with this view of order encourage the development of markets as a stimulus to increase “the wealth of nations.”
Smith’s theory of order stands in marked contrast to that of Thomas Hobbes, who argued that self-organization and competition leads to warfare and necessitates a single center of power dominating all social relationships and imposing peace and order on others. For Hobbes, order came from having a single decision maker rather than relying on the decisions made by many self-organized and independent decision makers. While modern scholars frequently deny their reliance on Hobbesian intellectual roots, the modern theory of “The State” is a direct descendant of Leviathan. The State is defined as an organization with a monopoly over the authority to make law and the legitimate use of coercion.

A major question puzzling analysts for some time has been how far the logic of market organization can be applied to the organization of productive activities beyond strictly private goods. In 1954, Paul Samuelson, for example, demonstrated that it was not possible to rely on decentralized, spontaneous (self-organized) processes to achieve the same level of optimality as that of an open competitive market when the goods involved were public goods and thus not excludable and subtractable. In the same year, H. Scott Gordon examined the effect of open competitive processes for common-pool resources, such as fisheries, where exclusion is also difficult but the goods appropriated by one user are not available to others. Both Samuelson and Gordon–and many scholars who have built on their work–revealed suboptimalities when dealing with collective goods (the term I will use to include both public goods and common-pool resources). Problems range from minor underprovision to the “tragedy of the commons.” Markets fail to achieve optimal results when externalities are generated, and it is difficult to exclude beneficiaries who gain an advantage without their contributing to the cost of provision. A policy prescription stemming from the work of these political economists and from some theoretical traditions in public administration has been that a centralized authority is necessary to achieve greater welfare potentials for collective goods.

Contemporary policy prescriptions tend to recommend Smith’s concept of market order for all private goods and Hobbes’s conception of the sovereign State for all collective goods. Since many of the goods and services desired in a modern economy are not pure private goods, this leads to the prescription that the State–in the singular–should provide and produce all the goods and services where markets fail. Showing that one institutional arrangement leads to sub-optimal performance is not equivalent, however, to showing that another institutional arrangement will perform better. Government monopolies also fail in providing and producing local public goods and common-pool resources efficiently and equitably. When preferences for levels and types of local public goods–such as the use of public spaces, the level of police protection, or investments in urban infrastructure–vary substantially within sub-populations, no known voting mechanism translates individual preferences into stable aggregations that reflect “the public interest” (Arrow, 1951). Problems of information loss, shirking, and budget maximization are substantial in large public bureaucracies (Tullock, 1965; Williamson, 1967; Miller, 1992). Mechanisms to reduce shirking and corruption are difficult to establish.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

for at læse mere om Elinor Ostrom.

Den anden modtager, Oliver Eaton Williamson kan man læse mere om på

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_E._Williamson

Og så ikke et ord om fredsprisen …

First-Year Grad Student Wins Nobel Prize in Economics!

From the Associated Press (with some light editing):

Pfuffnick’s Nobel Economics Prize triumph hailed by many

LONDON — The surprise choice of first-year graduate student Quintus Pfuffnick for the Nobel Prize in Economics drew praise from much of the world Friday even as many pointed out the youthful economist has not yet published anything in scholarly journals.

The new PhD candidate was hailed for his willingness to tackle difficult problems, his commitment to improving the economic system, and his goal of bringing efficiency and equality into harmony.

Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton, who won the prize in 2008, said Pfuffnick’s award shows great things are expected from him in the coming years.

“In a way, it’s an award coming near the beginning of the first year in grad school of a relatively young economist that anticipates an even greater contribution towards making our economy a better place for all,” he said. “It is an award that speaks to the promise of Mr Pfuffnick’s message of hope.”

He said the prize is a “wonderful recognition of Pfuffnick’s essay in his grad school application.”