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 :)