Nobel Economics Prize 2024 Awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson & James A. Robinson got the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for research into differences in prosperity between nations. The announcement was made in Stockholm. Acemoglu and Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Robinson conducts his research at the University of Chicago.

“The laureates’ model for explaining the circumstances under which political institutions are formed and changed has three components. The first is a conflict over how resources are allocated and who holds decision-making power in a society (the elite or the masses). The second is that the masses sometimes have the opportunity to exercise power by mobilising and threatening the ruling elite; power in a society is thus more than the power to make decisions. The third is the commitment problem, which means that the only alternative is for the elite to hand over decision-making power to the populace,” the Nobel Prize said in a post on X.

This award, officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established by the Swedish central bank in 1968 as a tribute to Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Prizes.

The prize will be presented alongside the other Nobel awards on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896. Last year's recipient, Claudia Goldin, was recognized for her work on gender disparities in the labor market, marking her as only the third woman to receive the economics prize among its 93 laureates.