Academics who could be in running for prestigious award include those working on price bubbles, productivity and corporate finance

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and a string of American academics are among potential candidates for the Nobel prize for economics, due to be announced on Monday in Stockholm.

The 9m Swedish kronor (£848,091) prize is not among the Nobel Foundation’s official awards for literature, peace, medicine, physics and chemistry but was established separately by Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, in memory of the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

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The Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences in a climate in which economists – and other experts more generally – are under pressure from rising populism, while neoliberal economics, advocating free markets, individualism and minimal state intervention, is increasingly discredited.

There have been 78 previous winners of the cash prize and medal which has become a significant honour for economists since it was initiated in 1968. Women are significantly underrepresented compared with some of the other Nobel prizes, such as those given for peace or literature. The American political economist Elinor Ostrom, who died in 2012, remains the only woman to have won the award. She shared the prize in 2009 with fellow American academic Oliver Williamson for her work exploring how people manage collective resources.

The prize was won last year by UK-born Oliver Hart of Harvard University and Bengt Holmström of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their work on contract theory, covering a range of issues from executive pay to public-private partnerships.

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The decision-making committees choose candidates in secret, with details of the process for each round kept under wraps for 50 years. However, the research company Clarivate Analytics has come up with a list of potential candidates based on analysis of academic citations.

Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein

The California Institute of Technology’s Camerer and the Carnegie Mellon University’s Loewenstein may win for their research into behavioural and experimental economics.

The academics are pioneers in the field of behavioural economics, with their research focusing on the connections between economic decisions, neuroscience and psychology.

Their analysis includes examinations of why people might make risky investments, the links between emotions and decision-making, and how markets might be susceptible to price bubbles.

Robert Hall

The professor of economics at Stanford University in California could win the prize for his analysis of worker productivity, studies of recessions and unemployment.

His work is particularly important in the wake of the financial crisis, as the global economy lurched into reverse before starting to recover – which still poses problems for governments and central banks to this day.

His recent work has shown that during a recession, unemployment does not increase because of a sharp rise in companies cutting jobs. Instead, it rises because jobseekers require longer to find new work.

Michael Jensen, Stewart Myers, Raghuram Rajan

The group of academics are singled out for their contributions to the study of decisions in corporate finance, including the complex factors behind the choices of individuals and organisations.

Jensen is professor of business administration at Harvard University and has focused his research on corporate governance, executive pay and incentives.

Myers is the Robert Merton professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on the valuation of assets and corporate finance, as well as the government regulation of business.

Rajan is the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, having left the central bank last year to become professor of finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

A former chief economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund, he is interested in economic development, banking and corporate finance.