Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his two fellow Americans succeed Guido Imbens, Joshua Angrist and David Card.
SourceAFP
© KAORU TACHIBANA / Yomiuri / The Yomiuri Shimbun via AFP
Published on
– Modified
Link copied
Copy link
Benjamin of the Nobel, the economics prize closed Monday, October 10 the season of famous awards. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his two fellow Americans Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig were honored in Stockholm for their work on financial crises and banks. They succeed the Canadian David Card, the American-Israeli Joshua Angrist and the American-Dutch Guido Imbens, three specialists in experimental economics.
The trio “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in our economy, particularly during financial crises, as well as how to regulate financial markets”, announced the Nobel jury. “An important discovery of their research”, whose work began from the 1980s, “was to show why avoiding the collapse of banks is vital”, underlined the committee of the Swedish Academy of Sciences responsible for awarding the prize. price.
Aged 68, Ben Bernanke was chairman of the Federal Reserve (Fed) between 2006 and 2014, a tenure marked by the 2008 financial crisis and the fall of the American bank Lehman Brothers. The largest bank failure in US history sparked a global financial crisis and underscored the risk posed by banking giants too big to fail (“too big to fail”). The jury, however, made no reference to his action as head of the Fed in the motivations for his award.
READ ALSOPhébé – Why Lehman Brothers should have been saved
The Diamond-Dybvig model in the spotlight
Ben Bernanke notably analyzed the Great Depression of the 1930s, the worst economic crisis in modern history, underlined the Nobel jury. The former central banker notably showed how massive withdrawals were a decisive factor in prolonging and worsening crises.
Douglas Diamond, born in October 1953, and Philip Dybvig, 67, have meanwhile developed theoretical models showing why banks exist and why their role in society makes them vulnerable to rumor about their impending collapse. This work led in particular to the Diamond-Dybvig model on self-fulfilling bank runs.
READ ALSOPhébé – Why the Fed is not independent
“If a large number of savers simultaneously rush to their banks to withdraw money, the rumor can become a self-fulfilling prophecy”, underlines the Nobel jury.
“Fake Nobel”
The only one not to have been provided for in Alfred Nobel’s will, the economics prize, created by the Swedish Central Bank “in memory” of the inventor, was added in 1969 to the five traditional awards (medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace), earning him the nickname of “false Nobel” among his detractors. American Elinor Ostrom (2009) and Franco-American Esther Duflo (2019) are the only women to have won the award so far.
Last year, the American-Canadian David Card, the American-Israeli Joshua Angrist and the American-Dutch Guido Imbe were crowned for their work in experimental economics. On Friday, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Beliatski, the NGO Memorial and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, in the midst of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The day before, Annie Ernaux had become the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, after 15 men. The Nobel Prize for Medicine had opened the ball by crowning the Swede Svante Pääbo last Monday, father of the man of Denisova and cartographer of the DNA of the Neanderthal man. That of physics rewarded the next day the Frenchman Alain Aspect, the Austrian Anton Zeilinger and the American John Clauser for their discoveries on the revolutionary mechanism of “quantum entanglement”, proving Albert Einstein himself wrong.
On Wednesday, a trio, the Americans Carolyn Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless together with the Dane Morten Meldal, who had been crowned in chemistry for “the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”, with an extremely rare second prize for Barry Sharpless.