Frontrunners emerge for Nobel Prize

Three US-based professors, along with one Oxford University academic, have been chosen as frontrunners for the Nobel Prize in economics by Thomson Reuters, which identifies the most influential researchers in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, and economics who could win the celebrated award.

This year, Stephen A Ross of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University’s Robert J Shiller and Oxford University’s Anthony B Atkinson, together with Angus S Deaton of Princeton University, have been identified as the most likely candidates.

“We recognise fundamental discoveries and identify the most important contributors to these discoveries,” said David Pendlebury, Thomson Reuters citation analyst, in a statement. “Our citation laureates have made such important contributions to science that we believe them to be peers of the Nobel Prize winners in every way; they simply have yet to win.”

OTHERS IN THE RECKONING Thomson Reuters 2012 Citation Laureates*
Name	Institution
CHEMISTRY
Louis E Brus	Columbia University, USA
Akira Fujishima	Tokyo University of Science
Masatake Haruta	Tokyo Metropolitan  University, Japan
Graham J Hutchings	Cardiff University, UK
PHYSICS
Charles H Bennett	IBM Corporation, USA
Gilles Brassard	University of Montreal, Canada
William K Wootters	Williams College,USA
Leigh T Canham	University of Birmingham, UK
Stephen E Harris	Stanford University, USA
Lene V Hau	Harvard University, USA
PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE
C David Allis	Rockefeller University, USA
Michael Grunstein	University of California, Los  Angeles, USA
Anthony R Hunter	University of California, USA
Anthony J Pawson	University of Toronto, Canada
Richard O Hynes	Massachusetts Institute of  Technology, USA
Erkki Ruoslahti	University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Masatoshi Takeichi	RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, Japan
*For all subjects excluding economics; SOURCE: Thomson Reuters

 

The 2012 Citation Laureates include 21 influential researchers across the four categories. So far, Thomson Reuters has successfully predicted 26 Nobel recipients.

Finance Favourite
Though Ross, Pendlebury noted in a commentary, has been called “the greatest living finance scholar”, having been central to the creation of many theories and concepts that are fundamental to finance, including agency theory, risk-neutral pricing, it is his work focused on arbitrage pricing theory that could get him the Nobel. Incidentally, the last “pure” finance Prize went to Robert C Merton and Myron S Scholes in 1997, Pendlebury added. Shiller, a Yale University professor who wrote the bestseller ‘Irrational Exuberance’ in 2000, warning of a stock market bubble, is the other favourite for his research on financial market volatility and the dynamics of asset prices. His 1981 article “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends” was ranked as one of the 20 most influential articles ever published in the American Economic Review, the US’ oldest scholarly journal in economics.

Transatlantic candidate
The final set of favourites consists of Oxford University’s Atkinson and Deaton of Princeton University, for their empirical research on consumption, income and savings, poverty and health, and well-being. “What joins the two together and suggests a Prize — split one-half for each — is their concern with precise measurements of income and its association with economic and social outcomes of many kinds,” wrote Pendlebury. “This is an area that has not been recognised by the Nobel Prize committees in economics in quite some time.”

The last Nobel Prize given for similar research was to Amartya Sen in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics.