1

Is He One of Ours?

The Institutional Allocation of Nobel Prize Winners in

Economics1

Jim Thomas

Research Associate

STICERD

London School of Economics

Houghton Street

London WC2A 2AE

thomasj@lse.ac.uk

Final Draft March 2009

1 The choice of ‘He’ in the title is not intended to be sexist, but reflects the fact that the Royal Swedish Academy of Science

decided not to award the prize to Joan Robinson, who deserved the prize in the view of many economists, so that all the

recipients to date have been men. A survey of names of economists likely to win the prize in the future suggests ‘He’ may

continue to be appropriate for some time to come.

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1. Introduction

Every year since 1969 in mid-October, when the Royal Swedish Academy of Science announces the

name or names of the Nobel Memorial Laureate in Economics, there is a flurry of activity to

congratulate the winner and explain the value of the research to the general public.2 In the background

there is also a flurry of activity as various institutions claim the winner for their own.3 What determines

whether an institution is entitled to claim a Nobel Laureate or not? There are no formal rules and, as

attaching a Nobel Laureate to an institution adds to its prestige, the links are sometimes rather tenuous.

One possible criterion is to claim winners if they are on the staff of the institution when the award is

made. This criterion is used to provide a list of institutions on the Nobel Prize web site at

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/universities.html and that information is presented in the first

column in Appendix Table A1 to show the number of Prize Winners by institution on this criterion.4

On this criterion, the University of Chicago is the most successful institution, with ten Prize Winners.

Then follow Princeton University (including the Institute for Advanced Studies) with five, Cambridge

University, Columbia University, Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley all

with four, MIT with three and Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, University of Oslo and

Yale University all with two Prize Winners. The remaining 21 institutions listed on the Nobel website

have one Prize Winner each. The distribution is very skewed, with the mode being one Prize Winner

per institution and the average is 1.97 Prize Winners per institution.

However, this criterion may be very misleading in terms of whether the institution should claim any

credit for the award of the Memorial Prize, as the recipient may have joined the institution after the

research for which it was awarded was carried out for a whole variety of reasons that have nothing to

do with the Nobel awards. Thus, it would seem that this is not a very satisfactory single criterion for

2 Strictly speaking, the Economics Prize is not a Nobel Prize, as it was not established by Nobel, but is an annual prize

awarded by the Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) as ‘the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of

Alfred Nobel’. However, it is popularly referred to as “the Nobel Prize in Economics” and, as that is a convenient

abbreviation, it will be used in this text. 3 I was prompted to think about this matter by a phone call I received some time ago from a member of the LSE

administration who told me that they had discovered that George Stigler had visited LSE in the late 1940s and asked if I

thought this entitled us to claim him as an LSE Nobel Prize Winner. 4 I accessed the nobelprize site on 23 October 2008. For some reason, this list omitted the following five Prize Winners:

Hayek, Lewis, Selton, Tinbergen and Tobin. I have supplied the missing institutional information, which is printed in italics,

using the biographical material provided in Vane and Mulhearn (2005).

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allocating Nobel Prize winners to institutions and one would wish to consider other forms of

institutional links.5

An alternative and much broader set of criteria is provided by a listing of Nobel Prize Winners by

Institutions in Wikipedia at http:en.wikipedia.org/Nobel_Prize_laureates_by_university_affiliation.6

The criteria used to allocate Prize Winners to each institution are defined by Wikipedia to cover the

following four possible associations:

[1] = Graduate (i.e. “Any laureate who received a degree from the academic institution.)

[2] = Attendee or Researcher (i.e. “Any laureate who attended at least one course or conducted research

at the institution, but did not receive a degree from it.)

[3] = Academic staff before or at the time of award (i.e. “Any laureate who was a member of the

respective institution’s academic staff before or during receiving the prize. The degree of affiliation

(adjunct, visiting, tenured etc.) is irrelevant for these purposes.

[4] = Academic staff after award (i.e. “Any laureate who was a member of the respective institution’s

academic staff only after receiving the prize. The degree of affiliation (adjunct, visiting, tenured etc.) is

irrelevant for these purposes.

Given these categories, the data relating to winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics are presented in

the second column of Table A1 and show a much larger number of winners claimed by the different

institutions. The University of Chicago remains in first place with 25 winners claimed and it is

followed by MIT with 17, Columbia University with 14, Harvard University with 12, Stanford and

Yale (both with 11), the London School of Economics and UC Berkeley (both with 10), New York

University and Oxford University (both with 9), Cambridge University and Princeton University (both

5 Jerry Hirsch in an article entitled ‘Nobel Prize Inflation Hits University of Chicago’ in the Los Angeles Times on 19

October 2000, deflated the University of Chicago’s claimed score of 72 Nobel Prize Winners in total to 17, these being

those who received the award while on the faculty. “The remainder were students, faculty or researchers at the University of

Chicago at some point in their careers—though not necessarily when they won the prize, or when they did the research that

won them the award.” (Hirsh, 2000, p. 1). 6 This site was accessed on 24/04/2008 and has been rechecked on a number of occasions since. The site consists of a large

table presenting an allocation of all Nobel Prize Winners to Institutions, listed in four columns based on the four criteria

discussed above. I have extracted the Nobel Prize Winners in Economics and summarized the information in Column 2 of

Table A1. I have collapsed the four columns in the Wikipedia table to one by using [1], [2]. [3] and [4] to provide

information on which column of the original Wikipedia table the Prize Winner was in. For three universities (Humboldt

University of Berlin, Princeton University and Utrecht University), the Wikipedia table contained a total for the number of

Nobel Prize Winners but here were no names listed. I have provided the missing names by visiting the websites of those

institutions and I have used the Wikipedia criteria to indicate which columns they would have been entered in the Wikipedia

table. Since this is not the official Wikipedia listing I have indicated this fact by recording these entries in italics as [1?] etc.

There seems to be a degree of anti-European bias in the Wikipedia entry as, according to the table, no institutions claimed

four of the Nobel Prize winners (namely Kantorovich, Ohlin, Selten and Tinbergen). One further problem with the

Wikipedia table is that all ten entries for the winners claimed by the London School of Economics are recorded in Column

1, which is incorrect, as we shall see below. This in indicated by [1?] in Table A1 and a corrected entry as [1?] etc.

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with 8), Carnegie Mellon with 7 and Johns Hopkins and the University of Minnesota (both with 5). The

remaining 53 institutions claim three or fewer winners and the modal value is one winner, claimed by

37 institutions. The distribution is very skewed, but the arithmetic mean is 3.46 claims per institution.

This is looking at the allocation of winners from the point of view of the institutions making the claims.

In Table A2, the information is reorganised to list for each Nobel Prize Winner the names of the

institutions claiming them as ‘one of ours’. The Nobel Prize Winner with most institutional claims is

Stiglitz with nine. He is followed by Aumann, Debreu, Mundell, Prescott, Sen and Smith with seven

claims each, Arrow and Heckman with six and Engle, Fogel, Friedman, Hurwicz, Klein, Koopmans,

McFadden and Mirrlees, all with five institutional claims. The remaining 28 winners have four or fewer

claims and the average number of institutional claims per Nobel Prize Winner is 3.67.

Having presented the Wikipedia analysis, let us consider how reasonable are the four criteria used to

construct these data.

[1] = Graduate (i.e. “Any laureate who received a degree from the academic institution.) As the

Nobel Prize in Economics has only been awarded to academic economists and to become an academic

requires the possession of a degree, this criterion has some relevance. However, the possession of a

degree does not guarantee the award of a Nobel Prize, so this criterion may be seen as a necessary but

not a sufficient condition and discounted accordingly, particularly for an undergraduate degree.

However, in some cases the research undertaken for the award of a PhD may contribute directly to the

work for which the prize is awarded and so would be a valid criterion in such cases.

[2] = Attendee or Researcher (i.e. “Any laureate who attended at least one course or conducted

research at the institution, but did not receive a degree from it.) This seems a weak criterion as

stated, unless one has additional information to show that the course attended or the research carried

out related to the work for which the prize was awarded.

[3] = Academic staff before or at the time of award (i.e. “Any laureate who was a member of the

respective institution’s academic staff before or during receiving the prize. The degree of

affiliation (adjunct, visiting, tenured etc.) is irrelevant for these purposes. As the prize is awarded

with a time lag (that is considerable in some cases), this criterion is weak as it refers to the time of the

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awarding of the prize. A stronger criterion would relate to the time spent at the institution to the time

when the research for which the prize was awarded was carried out.

[4] = Academic staff after award (i.e. “Any laureate who was a member of the respective

institution’s academic staff only after receiving the prize. The degree of affiliation (adjunct,

visiting, tenured etc.) is irrelevant for these purposes. This criterion also seems weak, as it is hard to

see what contribution an institution made to the research that led to the awarding of the prize if it all

happened before the laureate joined the institution.

The problem with criteria [2], [3] and [4] is that they all relate to the date of the award of the Nobel

Prize and not to the period when the research that won the prize was carried out. At first sight the use of

the date of the award might seem to be a reasonable compromise, as this date is easier to determine

than the date at which the winning research was carried out. However, this argument may be

challenged by pointing to some relevant information provided by the Nobel Prize authorities that is

ignored in the Wikipedia analysis. At the ceremonies in December to present the Nobel Prize, a

representative of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has the task of explaining why the prize was

awarded to this year’s recipient(s) and this presentation frequently makes detailed reference to

particular articles or books that were the basis for the award. In addition, the laureates in their

acceptance speeches often discuss the background and origins of the award-winning research. This

information can provide crucial information on whether or not an institution contributed to the

laureate’s gaining a Nobel Prize in Economics.

While this criterion seems more relevant than use of the affiliation of the laureate at the time of the

award, it can only capture some aspects of research. The Nobel Prize is awarded for originality and

imagination and the sources of the ideas behind the research may be more tenuous than mere

institutional affiliation. For example, comments given at a seminar while visiting another institution or

ideas exchanged with other colleagues by post, or nowadays, e-mail may trigger the basic ideas for the

research and these events are unlikely to be captured unless they are revealed in the laureate’s writings

or speeches. However, there is no doubt that some institutions during some periods have provided a

particularly stimulating environment for academic research – the graduate workshops at the University

of Chicago and the staff-graduate student seminar run by Robbins and Hayek at LSE during the 1930s

may be cited as two such examples.

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The possibility of utilising additional information to evaluate an institution’s contribution to Nobel

prize-winning research will be considered in the following sections. However, to apply the analysis to

all the laureates and all the institutions listed in Tables A.1 and A.2 would be a long and somewhat

tedious process, both for the reader and the author. As a result, I shall present a case study by applying

the analysis to some UK institutions and encourage the interested reader to extend the analysis to the

institution(s) of her or his choice.

To illustrate the possibility of using further information to judge an institution’s input into the award-

winning research, I shall consider three UK institutions. The first is the London School of Economics,

which is chosen as it is my home institution and is therefore of particular interest to me. The other two

institutions are Cambridge University and Oxford University, which are chosen because they have the

second and third largest number of laureates claimed after the LSE and because there is also some

overlap in the claims of these three institutions.

2. The Institutional Claims of London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Currently the LSE website claims that “A total of 14 LSE alumni or staff members have been awarded

Nobel Prizes”, and of these, ten were economists.7 The names of the ten economists are given in Table

1 below.

Table 1: LSE Nobel Memorial Laureates in Economics

Date Winner First Degree Higher Degree Affiliation

(at time of award)

1972 Sir John Hicks (J) PPE, Oxford, 1925 University of Oxford

1974 Friedrich von Hayek (J) PhDs, Vienna,

1921 +1923

University of Freiburg

1977 James Meade (J) BA, Oxford, 1930 MA, Oxford, 1933 University of Cambridge

1979 Sir Arthur Lewis (J) B.Com, LSE, 1937 PhD, University of

London, 1940

Princeton University

1990 Merton Miller BA, Harvard, 1944 PhD, Johns

Hopkins, 1952

University of Chicago

1991 Ronald Coase B.Com, LSE, 1932 PhD, University of

London, 1951

University of Chicago

1998 Amartya Sen BA, Calcutta, 1953 PhD, University of

Cambridge, 1959

University of Cambridge

7 Source: www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/nobelPrizeWinners , accessed on 10 April 2008.

In addition to the ten economists, George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Bertrand Russell (1950) won their prizes for Literature

and Ralph Bunche (1950) and Lord Philip Noel-Baker (1959) won the Peace Prize.

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1999 Robert Mundell BA, UBC, 1953 PhD, MIT, 1956 Columbia University

2001 George Akerlof (J) BA, Yale, 1962 PhD, MIT, 1966 University of California,

Berkeley

2007 Leonid Hurwicz (J) LL.M., University

of Warsaw, 1938

PhD, LSE (started,

unfinished),1938

University of Minnesota

NB: (J) = Joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in that year.

How do these claims fare under the criteria discussed in the previous section? As was shown above, the

Nobel Committee lists the affiliation of the laureate at the time of the award and this criterion does no

favours to LSE, as none of the laureates were at LSE when the award was made, giving them a score of

zero. Table 1 presents alumni data for first and higher degrees and on this criterion, Lewis and Coase

took the B.Com undergraduate degree and their PhDs at LSE, Mundell came to LSE to study for his

PhD and Hurwicz began a PhD but did not complete it. While there may be some merit to the argument

that without having done the undergraduate degree the Laureate could not have gone on to achieve the

Nobel win, the link between the content of a first degree and future research is somewhat remote.8

However, both Lewis and Coase completed PhDs at LSE, which does link in with future research. The

remaining winners are LSE’s by virtue of having been members of the staff of the School.

Having considered these criteria, let us now look at any additional information that is provided by the

Nobel Committee and/or the laureates to shed light on institutional affiliation and the prize-winning

research. First the laureates claimed by LSE.

Box 2.1: Hicks, John Richard (1904 – 1989)

Education: Balliol College, Oxford (1922–26). Hicks studied Mathematics for a year before switching

to the PPE degree. He graduated with Second Class Honours.

Academic Affiliations: 1926–35 Lecturer at LSE; 1935–38 Fellow of Gonville and Caiis College,

Cambridge; 1938–46 Professor of Economics at Manchester University; 1946–52 Fellow of Nuffield

College, Oxford; 1952–65 Drummond Professor of Economics, Oxford; 1965–71 Fellow of All Souls

College, Oxford.

LSE Connection: 1926–35 Lecturer at LSE.

Nobel Citation: Hicks was awarded the Nobel Prize (jointly with Kenneth J. Arrow) in 1972: “for their

pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory”. In his Nobel

Presentation, Ragnar Bentzel concentrates entirely on Hicks’s book Value and Capital (Bentzel, [1972]

1992, pp. 103-4).

8 In the same way it could be argued that without attending primary school an economist could not have won the Nobel

Memorial Prize, but I am not aware that any of these schools in the UK are as yet claiming their Laureates.

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LSE Nobel Connection: “By 1935 I had got so much that I needed to go away, to put it together. Thus

when an opportunity arose for moving to a University Lectureship at Cambridge (and Fellowship of

Gonville and Caiis College) I took it. My years at Cambridge (1935—1938) were mainly occupied in

writing Value and Capital, which was based on work I had done in London; so I was not in a state to

learn very much from association with Cambridge economists.” (Hicks, 1972, 1992, p. 133)

Conclusion: As Hicks makes clear, the research for Value and Capital was carried out during his time

at LSE and his collaboration with his colleagues, particularly RGD Allen, was important. So his Nobel

Prize clearly had a major LSE input.

Box 2.2: Hayek, Friedrich August von (1899—1992)

Education: University of Vienna, 1918—23, Doctorate in Law (1921) and Doctorate in Political

Science (1923); Postgraduate studies at New York University from March 1923 to June 1924.

Academic Affiliations: 1927—1931, Director, Austrian Institute for Trade Cycle Research, 1931—

1950 Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics at LSE, 1950—1962 Professor of Social and

Moral Science, University of Chicago (Committee on Social Thought), 1962—1968 Professor der

Volkwirtschaftslehre, Albert Ludwig University at Freiburg im Breisgau.

LSE Connection: 1931—1950: Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics at LSE. 1972:

Honorary Fellow at LSE.

Nobel Citation: Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize (jointly with Gunnar Myrdal in 1974: “for their

pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of

the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena”.

Having noted Hayek’s important work on the theory of business cycles, Erik Lundberg’s Presentation

continued:

It is above all the analysis of the viability of different economic systems which is among

Professor Hayek’s most important contributions to social science research. From the middle of

the 1930s onwards, he devoted increasing attention to the problems of socialist central planning.

In this area, as in all others to which Hayek has devoted research, he presented a detailed

exposition of ideas and conceptions in this field. He evolved new approaches in his examination

of fundamental difficulties in “socialist calculation” and investigated the possibilities of achieving

effective results through decentralized “market socialism”. …

Hayek’s ideas and analyses of the viability of economic systems, presented in a number of

writings, have provided important and stimulating impulses to the great and growing area of

research, which is named comparative economic systems. (Lindbeck, 1992, p. 183)

Conclusion: Hayek’s Nobel Prize was awarded for a body of work spread over a long period of time,

rather than for one significant contribution. His early theoretical work on business cycles was started

before he came to the LSE and was continued there during the 1930s, when he worked on capital

theory. During WW2, when the LSE was evacuated to Cambridge, he switched his attention away from

economic theory and wrote The Road to Serfdom, an important contribution to his later work on the

analysis of socialism and central planning. The time he spent at LSE provided a contribution to his

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work for the Nobel Prize, but work carried out both before and after he was at LSE was also important.

Thus, it may be claimed that LSE made some contribution to Hayek’s award-winning research.

Box 2.3: Meade, James Edward (1907—1995)

Education: 1926—1930 BA (PPE) at Oxford

Academic Affiliations: 1930—1937 Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford; 1937—1940 Economic

Section of the League of Nations in Geneva; 1940—1947 Economic Section of the War Cabinet

Secretariat; 1947—1957 Professor of Commerce at LSE; 1957—1967 Professor of Political Economy

at Cambridge; 1967—1974 Senior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

LSE Connection: 1947—1957 Professor of Commerce at LSE.

Nobel Citation: Meade was awarded the Nobel Prize (jointly with Bertil Ohlin) in 1977: “for their

pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements”.

LSE Nobel Connection: “In 1947 I became Professor of Commerce at the London School of Economics, where Lionel

Robbins was our leader in the economics department with its large and rich team of economic

colleagues. Of these I will mention only Professor A.W.H. Phillips to whom I owe an immense

intellectual debt of gratitude for education in the treatment of dynamic systems. There I embarked

on an over-ambitious project. My interest in economics has always been in the whole corpus of

economic theory, the interrelationships between the various fields of theory and their relevance

for the formulation of economic policy. In Oxford before the war I had, with this interest in mind,

written a short text-book entitled An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy. It was now

my intention to rewrite this work. I realised that it might be necessary to do so in more than one

volume. So, when I was appointed at the LSE to teach international economics, I started on The

Theory of International Economic Policy. It grew into my two books The Balance of Payments

and Trade and Welfare with their two mathematical appendices. The former examined the

international relations between a number of national economies constructed on the Keynesian

model; the latter applied the theory of economic welfare to international transactions.

These books took up practically the whole of my ten years at LSE; but even so they did not

cover the whole of the international problem, there being little or no reference in them to

international aspects of economic growth or of dynamic disequilibrium. My original project was

over-ambitious; but the part which I did manage to cover was sufficient eventually to gain for me

the Nobel Award.” (Meade, 1972, 1992, p. 295).

Conclusion: It is clear from Meade’s statement that the work that led to the Nobel Prize was carried

out while he was based at LSE and hence LSE made a major contribution to the award-winning

research.

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Box 2.4: Lewis, Sir W Arthur (1915 – 1991) Education: 1933—1937 B.Com. at LSE; 1940 PhD at LSE.

Academic Affiliations: 1938 – 1948 Lecturer at LSE; 1948 – 1958 Stanley Jevons Professor of

Political Economy; 1958 – 1962 Principal of the University College of the West Indies; 1963 – 1970

and 1973 – 1983 Professor of Economic and Political Economy at Princeton University.

LSE Connection: Student from 1933 to 1937 and member of staff from 1938 to 1948.

Nobel Citation: Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize (jointly with Theodore Schultz) in 1979: “for

their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the

problems of developing countries”.

In presenting Lewis and Schultz for the prize, Erik Lundberg wrote:

“Arthur Lewis has come to be known for two explanatory models which with the simplicity of

genius mark out the causes of poverty among the population of developing countries as well as

the factors determining the unsatisfactory pace of development.

The first of these models is founded on the “dual” character of developing country’s economy.

There is a traditionally operating agricultural sector, based principally on a subsistence economy

and involving a majority of the population, and there is a relatively modern market-oriented

sector aimed primarily at industrial production. The dynamics of the economy relate to the latter

sector, which expands with the support of more or less “unlimited” labour resources, owing to the

migration of people away from the agricultural sector. Labour will be available at the low wage

costs corresponding to the standard of living in an underdeveloped agricultural sector. The profits

accruing in the modern sector (“the capitalist sector”) provide the growing volume of savings

which finances the formation of capital for expansion.” (Lundberg, 1979, 1992, pp.375-6).

LSE Nobel Connection: “From the middle of the 1939s I had spent time in the Colonial Office Library reading reports

from the colonial territories on agricultural problems, mining, currency questions and the like,

and by comparing different territories, had learnt something about the efficacy of different

policies. I did some lecturing on this to colonial students at LSE in the 40s, but it was the throng

of Asian and African students at Manchester that set me lecturing systematically on development

economics from about 1950, following Hayek’s rule that the way to learn is to teach. …

From my undergraduate days, I had sought a solution to the question what determines the

relative prices of steel and coffee? The approach through marginal utility made no sense to me.

.And the Heckscher-Ohlin framework could not be used, since that assumes that trading partners

have the same production functions, whereas coffee cannot be grown in most of the steel

producing countries.

Another problem that troubled me was historical. Apparently, during the first fifty years of the

industrial revolution real wages in Britain remained more or less constant while profits and

savings soared. This could not be squared with the neoclassical framework, in which a rise in

investment should raise wages and depress the rate of return on capital.

One day in August 1952, walking down the road in Bangkok, it came to me suddenly that both

problems have the same solution. Throw away the neoclassical assumption that the quantity of

labour is fixed. An “unlimited supply of labour” will keep wages down, producing cheap coffee

in the first case and high profits in the second case. The result is a dual (national or world)

economy, where one part is a reservoir of cheap labour for the other. The unlimited supply of

labour derives ultimately from population pressure, so it is a phase in the demographic cycle.”

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(Lewis 1979, 1992, p. 397)

Conclusion: While some of Lewis’s interests in development existed in the form of the problems that

puzzled him as an undergraduate, it seems clear that the theoretical solution to these problems was

developed after he left LSE and moved to Manchester. His reference to the ‘Eureka moment’ in August

1952 is consistent with the conclusion that the ‘unlimited supply of labour’ assumption, which

contributed to his being awarded the Nobel Prize, suggests that his time at LSE made at most a very

small contribution to his award-winning research.

Box 2.5: Miller, Merton H. (1923—2000)

Education: 1940—44 BA in Economics, Harvard University; 1949—52 PhD Johns Hopkins

University.

Academic Affiliations: 1952—53 Assistant Lecturer in Economic History at LSE; 1953—61

Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Institute of Technology; 1961—2000

University of Chicago.

LSE Connection: 1952—53 Assistant Lecturer in Economic History

Nobel Citation: Miller was awarded the Nobel Prize (jointly with Harry M. Markowitz and William F.

Sharpe) in 1990: “for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics”.

LSE Nobel Connection: While Miller had worked as an economist in the US Treasury’s Division of

Tax Research (from 1943 to 1947) and then in the Research and Statistics Division of the Board of

Governors of the Federal Reserve (during 1948—49), he came to LSE to teach Economic History and

the research for which he was awarded to Nobel Prize began after he left LSE for the Carnegie Institute

of Technology. There is little if any connection between his work at LSE and the Nobel Prize

Conclusion: Given the lack of any connection between teaching Economic History at LSE and his

subsequent research that won him the Nobel Prize, he should be entered in the first column of Table 2.

Box 2.6: Coase, Ronald Harry (1910 –)

Education: 1931: B.Com. 1951; PhD (University of London).

Academic Affiliations: 1932-24: Assistant Lecturer at the Dundee School of Economics and

Commerce; 1934: Lecturer at Liverpool University; 1935-38: Assistant Lecturer at LSE; 1938-47:

Lecturer (War service in the Cabinet Office 1940-46) and 1947-51: Reader at LSE; 1951-58: Professor

at University of Buffalo; 1959-64 Professor at the University of Virginia; Since 1964: University of

Chicago.

LSE Connection: Studied for B.Com. and PhD at LSE. Awarded Cassel Travelling Scholarship by

LSE in 1931-32. Taught at LSE from 1938 to 1958.

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Nobel Citation: Coase was awarded the Nobel Prize in1991: ‘for his discovery and clarification of the

significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the

economy’.

In presenting Coase for the prize, Lars Werin wrote:

The economic system has an institutional structure, which we often regard as self-evident

because we observe it around us every day. But it is actually peculiar and intricate. For instance,

people make agreements among themselves in many different ways, ranging from simple

purchases to complex contracts; what determines the pattern? Economic activity takes place

within a framework of legal rules; contract law, tort law, etc; why are these laws formulated as

they are? And why do we have firms at all?

These and other components of the institutional structure must certainly be essential elements

in the functioning of the economic system. Nevertheless, economic theory could not answer these

questions. This state of affairs annoyed a young economist who had just received his first degree

in London in the 1930s. He wrote an essay with the perhaps untactically pretentious title The

Nature of the Firm. He provided a strong and productive answer to the last question, why firms

exist, although hardly anyone bothered to listen. He gradually added building blocks to his

theoretical construction, and had eventually—in the early 1960s—set forth the principles for

answering all of the questions.” (Werin, 1991, p. 3)

LSE Nobel Connection:

In his biographical statement for the Nobel presentation Coase wrote:

Let me start with The Nature of the Firm. I went as a student to the London School of Economics

in 1929 to study for a Bachelor of Commerce degree, specialising in the Industry group,

supposedly designed for people who wished to become works managers, a choice of occupation

for which I was singularly ill-suited. However, in 1931, I had a great stroke of luck. Arnold Plant

was appointed Professor of Commerce in 1930. He was a wonderful teacher. I began to attend his

seminar in 1931, some five months before I took the final examinations. It was a revelation. He

quoted Sir Arthur Salter: “The normal economic system works itself”. And he explained how a

competitive economic system coordinated by prices would lead to the production of goods and

services which consumers valued most highly. Before being exposed to Plant’s teaching, my

notions on how the economy worked were extremely woolly. After Plant’s seminar I had a

coherent view of the economic system. (Coase, 1991, pp. 13-14)

I spent the academic year 1931-32 on my Cassel Travelling Scholarship in the United States

studying the structure of American industries, with the aim of discovering why industries were

organized in different ways. I carried out this project mainly by visiting factories and businesses.

What came out of my enquiries was not a complete theory answering the questions with which I

started but the introduction of a new concept into economic analysis, transaction costs, and an

explanation of why there are firms. All this was achieved by the Summer of 1932, as the contents

of a lecture delivered in Dundee in October 1932 makes clear. These ideas became the basis for

my article “The Nature of the Firm”, published in 1937, cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of

Science in awarding me the 1991 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The delay

in publishing my ideas was partly due to a resistance to rush into print and partly to the fact that I

was heavily engaged in teaching and research on other projects.” (Coase, 1991, p. 9).

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Conclusion: Coase taught at LSE and was there when he wrote and published his article ‘The Nature

of the Firm’ in Economica in November 1937. However, his later work on ‘The Problem of Social

Cost’ (Coase 1960) was written after he had moved to the University of Chicago. Thus he may be

classified as having carried out the research that led to the Nobel Prize both during his time at LSE and

after he left that institution.

Box 2.7: Sen, Amartya Kumar (1933 –)

Education: 1951 – 3: BA Calcutta University; 1955: BA and 1959: PhD Cambridge University.

Academic Affiliations: 1963 – 1971: Professor of Economics, Delhi University; 1971 – 1977:

Professor of Economics, LSE; 1977 – 1987: Professor of Economics (Drummond Professor of Political

Economy from 1981), Oxford University; 1987 – 1998: Lamont University Professor, Harvard

University; 1998 – Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

LSE Connection: Professor of Economics at LSE, 1971 – 1977.

Nobel Citation: Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998 for ‘his contributions to welfare

economics’. Important publications cited were Sen (1970, 1973 and 1981).

LSE Nobel Connection: After moving to Oxford, Sen maintained his LSE connection as a Senior

Research Associate at the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related

Disciplines (STICERD) at LSE from 1988 to 1997, where he carried out research in collaboration with

Jean Drèze, the importance of which has been acknowledged by Sen.9

Conclusion: The Nobel Prize Press Release cites research by Sen covering most of his career, ranging

from his work on collective choice published in the 1970s to joint work with Jean Drèze published in

the late-1980s. While some of this research was carried out both before and after Sen was at LSE, it is

clear that his association with STICERD and Jean Drèze made a significant contribution to the award

of the Nobel Prize.

Box 2.8: Mundell, Robert A (1932 –)

Education: 1953: BA from the University of British Columbia; 1954: MA from the University of

Washington; 1956: PhD from M.I.T.; 1956—1957: Post-Doctoral Fellow in Political Economy at the

University of Chicago.

9 “By the mid-1980s, I was collaborating extensively with Jean Drèze, a young Belgian economist of extraordinary skill and

remarkable dedication. My understanding of hunger and deprivation owes a great deal to his insights and investigations, and

so does my recent work on development, which has been mostly done jointly with him. Indeed, my collaboration with Jean

has been extremely fruitful for me, not only because I have learned so much from his imaginative initiatives and insistent

thoroughness, but also because it is hard to beat an arrangement for joint work whereby Jean does most of the work whereas

I get a lot of the credit.” (Sen 1998, p. 7)

14

Academic Affiliations: 1958—1959: Assistant Professor at Stanford University; 1959—1961:

Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna;

1961—1963: Senior Economist at the International Monetary Fund; 1963—1964: Visiting Professor at

McGill University; 1964—1965: Research Professor at the Brookings Institute; 1965—1975: Professor

at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva; 1966—1971: Professor at the University of

Chicago; 1972—1974: Professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario; 1974— Professor at Columbia

University.

LSE Connection: Mundell came to LSE in 1955-56 to write his PhD thesis for M.I.T. under the

supervision of James Meade. His supervisor at M.I.T. was Charles Kindelberger.

Nobel Citation: Mundell was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1999 ‘for his analysis of monetary and fiscal

policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas.’

LSE Nobel Connection: Mundell came to LSE specifically to work for his PhD under the supervision

of James Meade and the subject of his doctoral research was clearly relevant to the work for which he

was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Conclusion: Mundell’s doctoral studies at LSE were important for his later research.

Box 2.9: Akerlof, George Arthur (1940 – )

Education: Yale University, BA in Mathematics and Economics in 1962; MIT, PhD in 1966

Academic Affiliations: 1966: Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley; 1967—1968:

Visiting Professor, the Indian Statistical Institute; 1969: Research Associate, Harvard University; 1970-

1977: Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley; 1978—1980: Cassel Professor with

respect to Money and Banking, LSE; 1980 – Koshland Professor of Economics, University of

California, Berkeley.

LSE Connection: 1978—1980: Cassel Professor with respect to Money and Banking.

Nobel Citation: Akerlof was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001, jointly with Michael Spence and

Joseph Stiglitz, ‘for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.’

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science document Information for the Public, issued in 2001, states

that:

Akerlof’s 1970 essay “The Market for Lemons” is the single most important study in the literature on

economics of information. It has the typical features of a truly seminal contribution – it addresses a

simple but profound and universal idea, with numerous implications and widespread applications.

(Royal Swedish Academy of Science, 2001 p.1) Most economists’ reaction on hearing of the award to

Akerlof was immediately ‘lemons’ as, despite being turned down by a number of prestigious journals

15

before being accepted by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, this article has an almost legendary

status.10

LSE Nobel Connection: Given the importance of the research that Akerlof carried out in the 1970s in

his being awarded the Nobel Prize, there is little if any direct LSE connection with this work.

Conclusion: Much of the basic research that led to George Akerlof being awarded the Nobel Prize was

carried out before he came to the LSE.

Box 2.10: Hurwicz, Leonid (1917 – 2008)

Education: 1938: LL.M., University of Warsaw; 1938—1939: studied for a PhD at LSE; Honorary Dr

Science, Northwestern University 1980.

Academic Affiliations: Research Associate Cowles Commission, University of Chicago 1944-46;

Associate Professor, Iowa State College 1946-49; Professor of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics

University of Illinois 1949-51: Professor of Economics and Mathematics, University of Minnesota

1951 – 2008.

LSE Connection: 1938-39: Began studying at LSE for a PhD, entitled ‘The Currency Devaluation

with Special Reference to the Experience of the Gold Bloc Countries’. However, according to his

biography on the Noble Prize website,11 “Leo went to London in the fall of ’38, but in the Spring of ’39

the British refused to extend his visa. So Hurwicz went to France and then to Switzerland on a transit

visa.” (p. 1). He did not return to London to continue his studies.

Nobel Citation: Hurwicz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007, jointly with Eric S. Maskin and Roger

B. Myerson, ‘for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.’

LSE Nobel Connection: The title of Hurwicz’s proposed PhD thesis was ‘The Currency Devaluation

with Special Reference to the Experience of the Gold Block Countries’, which seems to have little

relevance to his later work on Mechanism Design Theory. The Nobel Prize citation pinpoints Hurwicz

(1960 and 1972) as his “seminal” works in Mechanism Design Theory, and these were written long

after he left LSE.

Conclusion: Hurwicz was only in London for about six months and, given the first six months of any

PhD student’s studies tend not to be very productive, there would seem to be little if any link between

Hurwicz’s study at LSE and his subsequent research leading to the award of the Nobel Prize.

Summary:

Is there any convenient way to summarise this analysis? I had originally thought to classify laureates

according to whether the relevant research was carried out (i) before the recipient joined an institution,

10 It appears that Akerlof agrees, as in 2003 he wrote “I wrote “The Market for ‘Lemons’” (a 13-page paper for which I was

awarded the Prize in Economics) during my first year as assistant professor at Berkeley, in 1966-67.” (Akerlof 2003, p. 1) 11 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2007/hirwicz-bio.html.

16

(ii) while he was at the institution or (iii) after he had left the institution. However, there are a number

of problems with this potential classification. First, while this would work for laureates whose research

was very specific (e.g. Hicks and Meade) it is more complex where the research is spread over a longer

period during which he has been based at a number of institutions (e.g. Hayek and Sen). To deal with

this possibility and others, I decided to consider another possible summary in terms of the degree of the

contribution of the institution into the award-winning research. In Table 2, I have classified the

laureates according to three criteria, namely whether the LSE made (i) little or no contribution, (ii)

some contribution or (iii) a major contribution to the research.12

Table 2: The Status of LSE Nobel Prize Winners (by LSE contribution)

Little or No Contribution Some Contribution Major Contribution

Sir John Hicks

Friedrich von Hayek

James Meade

Sir Arthur Lewis

Merton Miller

Ronald Coase

Amartya Sen

Robert Mundell

George Akerlof

Leonid Hurwicz

On this criterion, one might conclude that six laureates may be claimed by LSE (Hicks, Hayek, Meade,

Coase, Sen and Mundell), while for the remaining four (Lewis, Miller, Akerlof and Hurwicz) the link is

more tenuous.

By way of comparison, Table 3 presents information on Nobel Memorial Laureates at two other UK

universities, Cambridge and Oxford, as obtained from their websites. The laureates claimed directly by

Oxford agree with the listing in Table A1, obtained from the Wikipedia website, but a comparison

12 One colleague suggested representing this on a scale of one to ten, but given the subjective nature of the classification, I felt that a numerical scale would imply a degree of precision that the analysis does not warrant.

17

shows that Wikipedia list an additional laureate for Cambridge, namely Eric Maskin. I have added his

name to the table in italics and will examine below whether Cambridge have any institutional claim on

him.

A comparison of the names in Tables 1 and 3 shows that there is some overlap as both Cambridge and

Oxford claim Sir John Hicks, James Meade and Amartya Sen.

Table 3: Nobel Memorial Laureates at Two Other UK Universities

Year Cambridge Oxford

1972 Sir John Hicks Sir John Hicks

1974 Gunnar Myrdal

1977 James Meade James Meade

1980 Lawrence Klein

1983 Gerard Debreu

1984 Richard Stone

1987 Robert Solow

1996 James Mirrlees James Mirrlees

1998 Amartya Sen Amartya Sen

2001 Joseph Stiglitz Joseph Stiglitz

2001 Michael Spence

2007 Eric Maskin

Source: The data were collected through a Google search carried out on 11 April 2008 of the

following websites:

http://www.cam.ac.uk/cambuniv/nobelprize.html

http://ox.ac.uk/about_the_university_people/oxonian_award_winners/

3. Cambridge University’s Institutional Claims for Nobel Prize Winners.

Box 3.1: Hicks, Sir John (1904 – 1989)

Information on Hicks’s education and academic affiliations was given above and will not be repeated

here.

Cambridge Connection: Hicks was Fellow of Gonville and Caiis College from 1935 to 1938.

Cambridge Nobel Connection: As Hicks made clear (see entry for Hicks above), his main purpose in

going to Cambridge was to write up the research he had carried out at LSE. In other words, the award-

winning research was already complete when he arrived in Cambridge.

Conclusion: While Cambridge did provide an academic environment for Hicks to write up his

18

research, it seems to have made little or no contribution to the research itself.

Box 3.2: Meade, James Edward (1907—1995)

Information on Meade’s education and academic affiliations was given above and will not be repeated

here.

Cambridge Connection: Meade was Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge from 1957 to 1967

and Senior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge from 1967 to 1974.

Cambridge Nobel Connection: Of his time at Cambridge, Meade wrote (Meade, 1977, p. 295):

In 1957 I moved from London to the chair of Political Economy in Cambridge, which I held till

1967, when I resigned to become a Senior Research Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. I

relinquished that Fellowship on retirement age in 1974. During these years I set out to confine my

over ambitious project, planning to write one or two volumes on the domestic aspects of

economic theory and policy. So far I have written four volumes in this series: The Stationary

Economy, The Growing Economy, The Controlled Economy, and The Just Economy. But even so,

I have managed only to make a beginning.

Conclusion: The research carried out by Meade at Cambridge was not cited by the Royal Swedish

Academy of Science as being relevant to the award of the prize, so it would seem that Cambridge did

not make any significant contribution to his obtaining the prize.

Box 3.3: Debreu, Gerard (1921 – 2004)

Education: Debreu obtained a degree in Mathematics in 1946 and a doctorate in Mathematics from the

University of Paris.

Academic Affiliations: Debreu was a Research Associate at the Centre National de la Recherche

Scientifique in Paris from 1946 to 1948. From 1948 to 1950 he had a Rockefeller Foundation

Scholarship and visited the United States, Sweden and Norway. From 1950 to 1955 he was a Research

Associate at the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago and moved with that institution to

Yale University, where he was Associate Professor until 1961. From 1962 to 1975 he was Professor of

Economics and from 1975 to 1986 Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

After 1986 he was Emeritus Professor of Economics and Mathematics there.

Cambridge Connection: In his Nobel Autobiography (Debreu 1983, p. 1), in his only mention of

Cambridge University, he writes:

“In the fall of 1968, I had the first of several long leaves which took me to CORE at the University of

Louvain (1968-69; fall, 1971; and winter, 1972), to Churchill College, Cambridge, England (spring

1972), to the Cowles Foundation at Yale University (fall, 1976), to the University of Bonn (winter and

spring, 1977), and to the CEPREMAP in Paris (fall 1980).”

Nobel Citation: Debreu was sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1983 “for having incorporated new

19

analytical methods into economic theory and for his rigorous reformulation of the theory of general

equilibrium”.

In introduction Debreu, Professor Karl-Gōran Māler (Māler, 1983, pp. 79-80) related Debreu’s work to

the earlier work of Walras:

Walras’ theory was of fundamental importance for subsequent development in economics. In

spite of its significance, not until the 1920’ were serious efforts made to determine the logical

consistency of this theoretical model. Does there exist some set of prices which equilibrate all

markets simultaneously? Do the equations which comprise Walras’ model have any meaningful

solution?

This question was answered in the affirmative by the research of Abraham Wald during the

1930s. It was unfortunately necessary for him to make unrealistic assumptions in order to prove

the existence of an equilibrium. Fro this reason, these results did not lead immediately to further

research.

Not before 1954 did the question of the internal logical consistency of general equilibrium

theory receive a rigorous answer. It was then that Professor Kenneth Arrow, who received the

Nobel prize in economics in 1972, and Gerard Debreu, who is to receive the prize today, wrote

the new classic article “Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy”. Professor

Lionel McKenzie should be mentioned here as well, due to important contributions which were

made by him concurrently.

While not mentioned in this address, many economists would also cite Debreu (1959) as

constituting more highly original work.

Cambridge Nobel Connection: The visit to Cambridge in 1972 seems to have been the only formal

contact Debreu had with that institution and there was none during the 1950s when the award-winning

research was carried out.

Conclusion: Given the limited contact Debreu had with Cambridge was long after the relevant research

was carried out, it would seem the institution made little or no contribution to the award of the prize.

Box 3.4: Stone, John Richard Nicholas (1913 – 1991)

Education: 1931 – 35 BA and 1938 MA, University of Cambridge.

Academic Affiliations: After war service in the Central Economic Information Service (CEIS) of the

War Cabinet Office and work at the Central Statistical Office from 1941 to 1945, he returned to

Cambridge to become the first director of the new Department of Applied Economics (DAE). From

1955 to his retirement in 1980, he was Professor of Finance and Accounting at Cambridge.

Cambridge Connection: Apart from his war service, Stone spent his whole academic career at

Cambridge.

Nobel Citation: Stone was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1984 “for having made fundamental

contributions to the development of systems of national accounts and hence greatly improved the basis

20

for empirical economic analysis.”

Cambridge Nobel Connection: Some early work on the system of National Income Accounts was

carried out while Stone was in government service during the Second World War, much of his research

was carried after the war during his time as director of the DAE.

Conclusion: As Stone carried out so much of his research at Cambridge, this institution may claim a

major input into his award-winning research.

Box 3.5: Mirrlees, James A. (1936 –)

Education: 1957: MA in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, University of Edinburgh: 1958: Parts II

and III of the Mathematical Tripos, Cambridge University; 1963: PhD in Economics, Cambridge

University.

Academic Affiliations: 1963 – 1968: Assistant Lecturer, then Lecturer and Fellow of Trinity College,

Cambridge; 1968 – 1995: Edgeworth Professor of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford;

1995 – Professor of Political Economy and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Cambridge Connection: Mirrlees was an undergraduate and postgraduate student at Cambridge and

taught there for two periods of time.

Nobel Citation: Mirrlees was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1996, jointly with William Vickrey, ‘for

their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetrical information’.

Two particular strands of research are cited. The first is the analysis of optimal income taxation

Mirrlees (1971), including work carried out with Peter Diamond (Diamond and Mirrlees 1971a and b).

The second is the analysis of principal-agent contract design (Mirrlees 1974, 1976)

Cambridge Nobel Connection: Mirrlees was working on optimal taxation policy while he was at

Cambridge and in his Nobel ‘Autobiography’ (Mirrlees 1996, p. 3) he writes of “… the work on

optimal taxation that Peter Diamond and I did in the next few years, after he came on a six-month visit

to Cambridge.”. This visit clearly made an important contribution to part of Mirrlees’s award-winning

research.

Conclusion: The analysis of the works cited in the Nobel award and Mirrlees’s link with Peter

Diamond suggests that Cambridge provided some input into the research on optimal taxation.

Box 3.6: Sen, Amartya K. (1933 –)

Education and Academic Affiliations: These were listed under the LSE entry and will not be repeated

here.

Cambridge Connection: Sen obtained a BA in economics in 1955 and his PhD in 1959.

Since 1998 he has been the Master of Trinity College.

21

Nobel Citation: See the LSE entry for the details.

Cambridge Nobel Connection: The research that led to the award of the Nobel Prize was carried out

after Sen left Cambridge. It would seem that the institution might have made a contribution to Sen’s

research if the academics there had shown a wider range of interests.13

Conclusion: It would seem that apart from stimulating some interest in social choice while Sen was a

graduate student there, Cambridge made little or no contribution to the award-winning research.

Box 3.7: Stiglitz, Joseph Eugene (1943 –)

Education: 1960 – 64 BA, Amherst College; 1964 – 66 PhD, MIT; 1965 – 6 Fulbright Fellow at

Cambridge University.

Academic Affiliations: 1966 – 7 Assistant Professor at MIT; 1967 – 70 Assistant, then Associate

Professor at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University; 1970 – 4 Professor of Economics at Yale

University; 1974 – 6 Professor of Economics at Stanford University; 1976 – 9 Drummond Professor of

Political Economy at Oxford University; 1979 – 88 Professor of Economics at Princeton University;

1988 – 2001 Professor of Economics at Stanford University; 2001 – Professor of Economics at

Columbia University.

Cambridge Connection: In addition to his studies as a Fulbright Fellow in 1965 – 6, Stiglitz was also

Tapp Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College from 1966 to 1970. Stiglitz was positive about his

time as a Fulbright Fellow:

After two years at MIT …, I received a Fulbright fellowship to Cambridge for 1965-1966. At the

time, there were three High Churches in the economics profession: Chicago on the right and

Cambridge, U.K. on the left, with MIT being in the center. Cambridge was still basking in the

reflected glory of Keynes, who had revolutionized economics some thirty years earlier. Lord

Kahn, of the Kahn multiplier …, Joan Robinson, Nicky Kaldor, James Meade, David

Champernowne, Piero Sraffa, these were among the gods that populated the colleges of

Cambridge. I wanted to see as many views as I could, and I worried about coming too much

under the influence of Samuelson and Solow. Joan Robinson was assigned as my tutor. … We

had a tumultuous relationship. … I was switched to Frank Hahn. He was flamboyant, and always

intellectually provocative. Cambridge was in ferment. The quality of the students and the young

lecturers matched that of the gray eminces (sic): Jim Mirrlees (later to get the Nobel Prize), Partha

Dasgupta, Tony Atkinson, Geoff Heal, David Newbery and a host of others. There was a sense of

excitement that was associated not just with the generation of new ideas, but with the belief that

those ideas were important, and not just for economics, but for society more broadly. As Frank

Hahn demonstrated the dynamic instability of the economy (a problem posed by the absence of

futures markets going out infinitely far into the future; in technical terms, the absence of a

transversality condition), he would excitedly exclaim that he had put another nail in the coffin of

capitalism.

13 In his Nobel ‘Autobiography’ Sen writes “But I fear I could not get anyone in Trinity, or in Cambridge, very excited in

the “theory” of social choice. I had to choose quite a different subject for my research thesis, after completing my B.A. The

thesis was on “the choice of techniques,” which interested Joan Robinson as well as Maurice Dobb.” (Sen, 1998, p. 3).

22

One evening I gave a seminar on a paper I was then completing, on the distribution of income

among individuals (using the kinds of tools that had used to describe the dynamics of growth to

describe the dynamics of inequality). The discussion had been followed by a lively debate. The

next morning, I received a twenty-page comment from James Meade (who received the Nobel

Prize in 1977), suggesting elaborations and alternative interpretations. There was a sense of a

community of scholars trying to understand some very important and complex problems.

(Stiglitz, 2001, p.3).

Nobel Citation: Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001 (jointly with George Akerlof and

Michael Spence) ‘for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information’.

In relation to the award to Stiglitz, specific research was highlighted. This included work with

Rothschild on adverse selection (Rothschild and Stiglitz 1976); work with Weiss on credit markets with

asymmetric information (Stiglitz and Weiss 1981, 1983); work with Grossman on the hypothesis of

efficiency on financial markets Grossman and Stiglitz 1980) and work with Shapiro to develop a labour

market with efficiency wages (Shapiro and Stiglitz 1984)

Other areas of research mentioned were an important study of sharecropping (Stiglitz 1974b) and

public economics, with work on the theory of optimal taxation (Stiglitz and Dasgupta 1971), industrial

organisation (Dixit and Stiglitz 1977) and the economics of natural resources (Stiglitz 1974a and

Dasgupta and Stiglitz 1980).

Cambridge Nobel Connection: The research cited in connection with the award of the Nobel Prize

includes joint work with Partha Dasgupta (who was in Cambridge while Stiglitz was there on the

Fulbright Fellowship).

Conclusion: All the research cited for the Nobel Prize was carried out after Stiglitz left Cambridge and

while there may be some link via Dasgupta, the link would not appear to be very strong.

While not claimed as one of theirs by the University of Cambridge, Eric Maskin is listed for that

institution in the Wikipedia table, so his eligibility as a Cambridge candidate will be considered.

Box 3.8: Maskin, Eric Stark (1950 –)

Education: Harvard University: BA 1972; MA 1974 and PhD 1976.

Academic Affiliations: Assistant Professor at MIT 1977—1984; Professor at Harvard University

1985—2000 and since 2000 Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Cambridge Connection: Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge 1976-7. Visited Churchill

College in 1980—2. Elected Honorary Fellow of St. John’s College in 2004. Of his first period in

Cambridge Maskin writes:

Ken [Arrow] thought I’d benefit from sitting at the feet of his friend and collaborator Frank Hahn,

who helped arrange a post-doctoral research fellowship for me at Jesus College in Cambridge

University. That year was a marvellous experience in every way – from Cambridge college life,

to London theatre, to touring round Europe. But the true highlights were weekly “tutorial”

23

sessions with Frank, and the opportunity to start research projects and life-long friendships with

Jean-Jacques Laffont (then in Paris) and Partha Dasgupta (then at LSE).

While in England, I got caught up in a problem inspired by the work of another new friend, Leo

Hurwicz (Ken had introduced me to him at Stanford); under what circumstance is it possible to

design a mechanism (that is, a procedure or game) that implements a given social goal (formally,

a social choice rule)? After struggling with that question for most of the year, I finally realized

that monotonicity (now sometimes called “Maskin monotonicity”) was the key. (Maskin, 2007, p.

1).

Nobel Citation: Maskin was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007 (jointly with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger

B. Myerson) ‘for having laid the foundation of mechanism design theory’.

Cambridge Nobel Connection: Among the publications cited as contributing to the award of the Prize

are Dasgupta, Diamond and Maskin (1979) and Laffont and Maskin (1979) and, as the quotation

immediately above indicates, Maskin’s contacts with both Laffont and Dasgupta, as well as his interest

in mechanism design were features of his first period spent in Cambridge.

Conclusion: The evidence is that time spent in Cambridge made some contribution to the award-

winning research.

Summary

The overall conclusions concerning Cambridge University’s claims to Nobel Prize Winners are

summarised in Table 4, which suggests that in terms of an institutional contribution, Cambridge can

claim three out of the seven laureates plus Eric Maskin, who is not on their list.

Table 4: The Status of Cambridge University Nobel Prize Winners (by Cambridge contribution)

Little or No Contribution Some Contribution Major Contribution

Sir John Hicks

James Meade

Gerard Debreu

Richard Stone

James Mirrlees

Amartya Sen

Joseph Stiglitz

Eric Maskin

24

4. Oxford University’s Institutional Claims for Nobel Prize Winners.

Next, consider the ten Nobel Prize Winners claimed by Oxford University:

Box 4.1. Hicks, Sir John (1904 – 1989)

Education and Academic Affiliations: These were listed under the LSE entry and will not be repeated

here.

Oxford Connection: 1922—26: Hicks was a student at Balliol College; 1946–52 Fellow of Nuffield

College, Oxford; 1952–65 Drummond Professor of Economics, Oxford; 1965–71 Fellow of All Souls

College, Oxford.

Nobel Citation: This was given under the LSE entry and will not be repeated here.

Oxford Nobel Connection: Although Hicks spent a good deal of his academic life in Oxford, the Prize

was awarded for research that was carried out at LSE in the 1930s.

Conclusion: Oxford made no obvious contribution to the research for which the Nobel Prize was

awarded.

Box 4.2. Myrdal, Gunnar (1898 – 1987)

Education: 1927: Dr Juris Econ, University of Stockholm.

Academic Affiliations: 1931—2: Associate Professor, Post-Graduate Institute of International Studies,

University of Geneva; 1933 – 39: Lars Hierta Chair in Political Economy, University of Stockholm;

1961 – 65 Professor of International Economics, University of Stockholm; 1965 – 87 Professor

Emeritus, University of Stockholm.

Oxford Connection: Myrdal was a Fellow of Balliol College in 1958—9.14

Nobel Citation: Myrdal was awarded the Nobel Prize (jointly with Friedrich Hayek) in 1974 “for their

pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of

the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena”.

Having referred in his Presentation to Myrdal’s early work on business-cycle theory and monetary

theory in the 1920s and 1930s, Erik Lundberg continues:

It is above all in the great work An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern

14 In addition, there seem to have been informal links with Balliol College. Stellan Andersson notes: “From 1957, when

Gunnar Myrdal spent a long period in New Delhi – where Alva Myrdal had become the Swedish Ambassador in 1955 – his

correspondence with colleagues all over the world grew. As a rule, he spent his summers at Balliol College, Oxford, where

his friends, headed by Professors Thomas Balogh and Paul Streeten, took good care of him.” (Andersson, 2009, pp. 6-7)

25

Democracy that Myrdal has proved his eminent ability to combine economic analysis with a wide

social science approach in studying the series of factors and relations which may determine the

situation of the negro population and its possibilities of development. (Lundbeck, [1974] 1992, p.

174).

Oxford Nobel Connection: Myrdal’s award-winning research on monetary theory dates from the

1920s and 1930s and An American Dilemma was published in 1944. His Oxford connections date from

the 1950s.

Conclusion: It would seem that Oxford made no contribution to Myrdal’s award-winning research.

Box 4.3. Meade, James Edward (1907 – 1995)

Education and Academic Affiliations: These were listed under the LSE entry and will not be repeated

here.

Oxford Connection: 1926—1930: BA (PPE) at Oxford; 1930—1937 Fellow of Hertford College,

Oxford.

Nobel Citation: This was listed under the LSE entry and will not be repeated here.

Oxford Nobel Connection: After carrying out the award-winning research at LSE, Meade moved to

Cambridge and spent the rest of his academic career there. He had no formal links with Oxford after

leaving Hertford College in 1937.

Conclusion: It would seem that Oxford made no contribution to Meade’s award-winning research.

Box 4.4. Klein, Lawrence (1920 –)

Education: 1942: BA, University of California, Berkeley; 1944: PhD, MIT.

Academic Affiliations: 1944—48: Research Associate at the Cowles Commission at the University of

Chicago; 1948—50: Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER);

1949—54 Research Associate at the Survey Research Centre at the University of Michigan; 1954—8

Senior Research Officer and then Reader in Economics at the Institute of Statistics, University of

Oxford; 1958—91 Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania; 1991— Benjamin Franklin

Professor of Economics, Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania.

Oxford Connection: 1954—8 Senior Research Officer and then Reader in Economics at the Institute

of Statistics, University of Oxford.

Nobel Citation: Klein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980 ‘for the creation of econometric models

and their application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies”. In his Nobel

26

Presentation, Hermann Wold wrote:

Briefly stated: Lawrence Klein has created and established a paradigm for economic macromodels,

a general pattern for their theoretical construction and practical application. Klein’s paradigm includes

the institutional organization, with a regular procedure for the generation of economic forecasts, with a

service system for policy consultations, and with an approach to model adjustment to account for

longer run changes in the economic world. (Wold, [1980] 1992, 413-5.)

Oxford Nobel Connection: Klein’s account of the time he spent at Oxford in his Nobel

Autobiography is very brief: “After four years at Michigan, I went to Oxford, at the suggestion of

Frank Burchardt of the Institute of Statistics to work on the data from the Oxford Savings Surveys and

also build a model of the U.K. During a four year stay at Oxford, I got started on some studies in

theoretical econometrics dealing with methods of statistical inference.” (Klein, 1980, 1992, p. 418).15

Jim Ball, one of the co-authors of the first econometric model of the UK (Klein, Ball, Hazelwood and

Vandome, 1961) has written more fully of the period:

By the time the volume on the Klein-Goldberger model had been published, Klein had left the

United States for Oxford essentially as a refugee from the McCarthy era. He was received at

Oxford and given a Readership, but the Oxford of that time had little interest in his main-stream

work in econometrics and provided at first few resources for model building. However, Klein’s

experience in survey work on savings at Michigan served him in good stead since the Oxford

University Institute of Statistics, together with the government, had been engaged in what were

known as the Oxford Savings Surveys and Klein played a substantial role in this activity. Finally,

resources were made available for model building work and a first substantial scale model of the

United Kingdom economy was constructed at the Institute, which is contained in a book that was

eventually published in 1961. On the whole, this was a poor model, whose construction was far

too ambitious for the available data, particularly the lack of quarterly national accounts. Klein’s

own departure from Oxford in 1958 sealed the fate of this project and serious model building for

the U.K. economy did not begin again until the mid-sixties. (Ball, 1984, pp. 335-6).

Conclusion: While Wold’s Nobel Presentation refers to Klein’s subsequent research at the Wharton

School and Project LINK, there is no specific mention of the Klein-Ball UK model. However, the four

years Klein spent in Oxford enabled him to avoid a potentially unpleasant political witch-hunt during

the McCarthy era and also enabled him to gain further experience in econometric model building, even

though data and computational constraints limited the success of the project. As a result, Oxford may

have made some positive contribution to the ultimate award of the Nobel Prize to Lawrence Klein.

Box 4.5. Solow, Robert (1924 –)

Education: 1942—1947 (with an interruption for military service) BA, 1949 MA and 1951 PhD,

Harvard University.

Academic Affiliations: 1949 Assistant Professor of Statistics; 1954 Associate Professor of Statistics;

15 For a longer and more positive account of his time in Oxford, see The ET Interview (Mariano, 1987, pp. 422-28). There

he says that while he was in Oxford he began work on his formulation of two-stage-least-squares as an Instrumental

Variable estimator and also started working on distributed lags.

27

1958 Professor of Economics; 1995 Institute Professor Emeritus, all at MIT.

Oxford Connection: Solow was George Eastman Visiting Professor and Fellow of Balliol College in

1968-9.16

Nobel Citation: Solow was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1987 ‘for his contributions to the theory of

economic growth’. While no articles or books are specifically mentioned in the Nobel Presentation,

three of his early papers (Solow 1956, 1957 and 1960) have become classics and generally regarded as

making a major contribution to the award.

Oxford Nobel Connection: Solow’s year at Oxford came some time after the award-winning research

was carried out.

Conclusion: It would seem that Oxford made no contribution to Solow’s award-winning research.

Box 4.6. Mirrlees, James (19 –)

Education and Academic Affiliations: These were listed under the Cambridge entry and will not be

repeated here.

Oxford Connection: 1968—1995 Edgeworth Professor of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College,

Oxford.

Nobel Citation: This was provided under the Cambridge entry and will not be repeated here.

Oxford Nobel Connection: In his Nobel ‘Autobiography’ Mirrlees wrote of his move to Oxford:

Oxford had a professorship of economics, which had to be in mathematical economics or in

econometrics. David Champernowne had held it. Now it was vacant and proving hard to fill.

They decided that some baby-snatching was in order, and offered it to me in 1968. At that time,

thirty-two seemed quite young for a professor. Cambridge was still the place to be, with James

Meade and Dick Stone, and good new people, often recruited by Dick; but Frank Hahn had

already left, and Cambridge was increasingly suffering from shrill doctrinal, almost religious,

squabbles (mainly then with the rest of the world). It was time to go. I briefly toyed with MIT and

LSE, both standing higher than Oxford, but we were small-town people. At that time, Ian Little,

at Nuffield, had already got me to do a manual on Cost Benefit Analysis with him. Paradoxically,

the Oxford choice probably meant I would not specialize too severely in mathematical

economics. It also meant that I would deal entirely with graduate students. It was immensely

helpful to have that simplification in what had become a too complex academic life.

In the intervening sabbatical term at MIT, between Cambridge and Oxford, work on nonlinear

incentive relationships began. That year, or the next, the first version of the optimal income tax

paper went round, but mathematical justification took another year and too many pages. …

16 The George Eastman Visiting Professorship was established by George Eastman (of Eastman Kodak) in 1929. The post

carries with it a Fellowship at Balliol College. Solow appears to be the only economist who has held this post.

28

Already several superb PhD students had come to me as supervisor, for example, Azizur Rahman

Khan and Partha Dasgupta, and I taught David Newbery as an undergraduate. From that time on I

found myself almost invariably with at least one, often several research students of the highest

class. The Oxford environment seemed to make that happen. I have always supervised research

much more diverse than what I do myself, and by no means all of them worked in the

principal/agent or welfare economics field. Some became colleagues. It was only quite loosely a

school of optimum taxes and welfare and incentives. I am proud that in due course industrial

economics and game theory flourished at Oxford. Even they are not unconnected with incentive

and contract theory, but there is no doctrinal connection, no common catechism. (Mirrlees, 1996,

p. 3).

Conclusion: It is clear that Mirrlees continued the research that was begun at Cambridge after he

moved to Oxford and therefore that institution made some contribution to the award of the Nobel Prize.

Box 4.7. Sen, Amartya (19 –)

Education and Academic Affiliations: These were listed under the LSE entry and will not be repeated

here.

Oxford Connection: 1977 – 1987: Professor of Economics (Drummond Professor of Political

Economy from 1981), Oxford University

Nobel Citation: This was provided under the LSE entry and will not be repeated here.

Oxford Nobel Connection: In his Nobel ‘Autobiography’ Sen writes:

As I settled down at the London School of Economics in 1971, I resumed my work on social choice

theory. Again, I had excellent students at LSE, and later on at Oxford. …

I was also fortunate to have colleagues who were working on serious social choice problems, including

Peter Hammond, Charles Blackorby, Kotaro Suzumura, Geoffrey Heal, Gracieda Chichilnisky, Ken

Binmore, Wulf Gaertner, Eric Maskin, John Muellbauer, Kevin Roberts, Susan Hurley, at LSE or

Oxford, or neighbouring British universities. (I also learned greatly from conversations with

economists who were in other fields, but whose works were of great interest to me, including Sudhir

Anand, Tony Atkinson, Christopher Bliss, Meghnad Desai, Terence Gorman, Frank Hahn, David

Hendry, Richard Layard, James Mirrlees, John Muellbaurer, Steve Nickel, among others.) … There

were many new formal results and informal understandings that emerged in these works, and the gloom

of “impossibility results” ceased to be the only prominent theme in the field. The 1970s were probably

the golden years of social choice theory across the world. Personally, I had the sense of having a ball.

(Sen, 1998, p. 5).

Sen was at Oxford for part of the 1970s and many of the names of colleagues listed in the quotation

were based in Oxford.

Conclusion: Oxford did make some contribution to Sen’s award-winning research.

29

Box 4.8. Stiglitz, Joseph (19 –)

Education and Academic Affiliations: These were listed under the Cambridge entry and will not be

repeated here.

Oxford Connection: 1976 – 78: Drummond Professor of Political Economy.

Nobel Citation: This was provided under the Cambridge entry and will not be repeated here.

Oxford Nobel Connection: There is little direct evidence of a research connection, as Stiglitz does not

mention Oxford University in his Nobel ‘Autobiography’.

Conclusion: As Stiglitz was working on the relevant topics while he was at Oxford, the institution

may have contributed to the award-winning research.

Box 4.9. Spence, Michael (19 –)

Education: 1962 – 66: BA, Princeton University; 1966 – 68: Canadian Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, BA

in Mathematics; 1968 – 72: PhD Harvard University.

Academic Affiliations: 971 – 3: Teaching at Harvard; 1973 – 75 Assistant Professor of Economics,

Stanford University; 1975 – 90: Professor of Economics, Harvard University; 1990 –99: Dean of the

Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; 1999 – Emeritus Professor of Management,

Stanford University.

Oxford Connection: Canadian Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, BA in Mathematics; 1968 – 72

Nobel Citation: Spence was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001, jointly with George Akerlof and Joseph

Stiglitz) ‘for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information’.

Oxford Nobel Connection: Spence was an undergraduate at Oxford University and, while the

mathematics he learned there may have been useful to his later studies and research, it does not link

directly to his award-winning research.

Conclusion: It does not seem that Oxford made any direct contribution to Spence’s award of the Nobel

Prize.

30

Summary

Having discussed the Nobel Prize Winners claimed by Oxford University, the results are summarised

in Table 5, which suggests that in terms of institutional contributions, Oxford can claim four out of the

nine laureates they claim

Table 5: The Status of Oxford University Nobel Prize Winners (by Oxford contribution)

Little or No Contribution Some Contribution Major Contribution

Sir John Hicks

Gunnar Myrdal

James Meade

Lawrence Klein

Robert Solow

James Mirrlees

Amartya Sen

Joseph Stiglitz (?)

Michael Spence

Conclusions

It is clear that for some institutions, garnering Nobel Prize winners is an important activity.17 Their task

was made potentially easier in 1969, when the Bank of Sweden began awarding ‘the Bank of Sweden

17 An article by Donald MacLeod on 21 October 2004 in Education Guardian entitled ‘On the prowl for Nobel

prizewinners’ reported on the launch of the ‘superversity’ created by the merger of the Victoria University and UMIST:

President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Alan Gilbert and his colleagues at the newly merged University of Manchester

have a dream – to become one of the world’s leading universities over the course of the next decade. But this being

Manchester, they have written it down in hard and fast goals with figures to match. There is no wiggle room, as the

politicians say.

So rather than talk of world-class scholarship at the new institution … the plan, called Manchester 2015, says there will be

five or six Nobel prize winners “or scholars of equivalent reputation” on the staff. …

He [Alan Gilbert] wants three Nobel laureates on the staff by 2007 and some visible progress towards recruiting them by the

end of the year. …

It will cost money -- £10m to £20m to bring a laureate and his or her team to Manchester with conditions comparable to

those they could command in the US, Japan or Singapore. (MacLeod, 2004)

31

Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’ and increased the size of the pool. Once the

name(s) of the laureate(s) is/are announced many institutions check their records to see if he or they are

claimable as ‘one of ours’. The criteria for the claim vary. The Nobel Prize website attributes laureates

to the institution to which they were attached when the prize was awarded, but as the prize is often

awarded in the twilight of a researcher’s career, the link between the institution and the research for

which the prize was awarded may be rather tenuous. In contrast, the Wikipedia entry on Nobel Prize

Winners uses a much broader set of criteria that include being a student or staff member at an

institution, as well as merely attending a course there. Using these two sources, Appendix Table A1

and A2 were prepared listing the economic laureates claimed by various institutions and the institutions

claiming each laureate respectively.

Neither of these two methods of allocating institutional claims relates the institution to the research for

which the prize was awarded. However, it is possible to make some progress here by utilising

important and relevant information that is contained in the Nobel Presentation for each laureate, which

outlines the reasons for the award and often cites specific research and publications. In addition, the

‘Autobiography’ each laureate supplies as part of the award ceremony also often contains information

about the way in which the award-winning research came about and, in some cases, interviews with the

laureate may contain discussion concerning the award-winning research. To illustrate the potential

usefulness of this information, the paper examines the claims made by three UK institutions

(Cambridge University, the London School of Economics and Oxford University) to see to what extent

the institution made some contribution to the award-winning research.

The analysis suggests that while all three institutions may claim a number of laureates on the ground

that they were students or on the staff (or visited) at some time, it is difficult to justify the claim for

some laureates on the basis of a contribution to the award-winning research.

The criterion chosen for this allocation of Prize winners is obviously very strict and, although I have

only applied it in a systematic way to three institutions, my hypothesis is that the list of Nobel Prize

winners in Economics published by most other institutions would be shortened if this criterion were to

be applied. For example, Cambridge and Oxford both claim Hicks and Meade even though the relevant

research was not carried out at those institutions.

32

For those who regard bagging Nobel Prize Winners as a game, the criterion proposed here is irrelevant,

as merely having spent time at an institution is sufficient for a claim. For those economists who take

the Prize more seriously as a reward for outstanding research, some link between an institution and the

research may seem to have some relevance.

Finally, for those members of institutions who view quantity as being more important than quality and

would like to expand their haul of laureates, I have a suggestion. As is clear from the analysis of award-

winning research, not all laureates work alone in their research and the bibliography at the end of this

paper lists many joint articles and books that have been cited as contributing to the award. Now, co-

authoring research that leads to the award of a Nobel Prize is not exactly the same as actually winning

it, but if one called these economists ‘Quasi-Nobel Prize Winners’, a new possibility opens up.

33

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38

APPENDIX

Table A1: Nobel Prize Winners Claimed by Institutions

Nobel Listing Wikipedia Listing

Academy of Science, Moscow

Kantorovich, L.V.

Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg

Hayek, F.A. [3]

Amherst College

Phelps, E. [1]

Stiglitz, J.E. [1]

Arizona State University

Prescott, E.C. Prescott, E.C. [3]

California Institute of Technology

Smith, V.L. [1]

Cambridge University

Debreu, G. [2]

Hicks, J.R. [3]

Maskin, E. [3]

Meade, J.E. Meade, J.E. [3]

Mirrlees, J.A. Mirrlees, J.A. [1, 3]

Sen, A.K. Sen, A.K. [1, 2, 4]

Stiglitz, J.E. [2]

Stone, J.R.N. Stone, J.R.N. [1, 3]

Carnegie Mellon University

Kydland, F.E. Kydland, F.E. [1]

Lucas, R.J. [3]

Miller, M.H. [3]

Modigliani, F. [3]

Nash, J.F. [1]

Prescott, E.C. [1]

Simon, H. Simon. H. [3]

Case Western Reserve University

Prescott, E.C. [1]

Center for Study of Public Choice, Fairfax, VA

Buchanan, J.M.

City College of New York

Arrow, K.J. [1]

Aumann, R.J. [1]

City University of New York

Aumann, R.J. [1]

Arrow, K.J. [1]

Markowitz, H.M. Markowitz, H.M. [3]

39

Columbia University

Arrow, K.J. [1]

Becker, G.S. [3]

Fogel, R.W. [1]

Friedman, M. [1, 2, 3]

Heckman, J. [3]

Kuznets, S.S. [1]

Merton, R.C. [1]

Modigliani, F. [3]

Mundell, R.A. Mundell, R.A. [3]

Phelps, E.S. Phelps, ES. [3]

Solow, R.A. [2]

Stigler, G.J. [3]

Stiglitz, J.E. Stiglitz, J. [3]

Vickrey, W. Vickrey, W. [1, 3]

Cornell University

Engle, R.F. [1]

Fogel, R. [1]

Sen, A.K. [3]

Duke University

Stiglitz, J.E. [4]

École National Supérieur des Mines de Paris

Allais, M.

École Normale Superieure

Debreu,G. [1]

École Polytechnique

Allais, M. [1]

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Minneapolis

Prescott, E.C.

Florida State University

Buchanan, J.M. [3]

George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Buchanan, J.M. [3]

Smith, V.L. Smith, V.L. [3]

Harvard University

Arrow, K.J. Arrow, K.J. [3]

Kuznets, S. Kuznets, S [3]

Leontief, W. Leontief, W. [3]

Maskin, E. [1]

Merton, R.C.

Miller, M.H. [1]

Myerson, R. [1]

Samuelson, P.A [1].

Sen, A.K. [3]

Smith, V.L. [1]

Solow, R.M. [1]

40

Spence, A.M. [3]

Tobin, J. [1]

Humboldt University of Berlin

Leontief, W. [1?]

Illinois Institute of Technology

Simon, H, [3]

Johns Hopkins University

Fogel, R. [1]

Kuznets, S. [3]

Miller, M.H. [1]

Mundell, R.A. [3]

Stone, J.R.N. [3]

London School of Economics and Political Science

Akerlof, G. [1] [3?]

Coase, R.H. [1] [1, 3?]

Hayek, F.A. [1] [3?]

Hicks, J.R. [1] [3?]

Hurwicz, L. [1]

Lewis, W.A. [1] [1, 3?]

Meade, J.E. [1] [3?]

Miller, M. [1] [3?]

Mundell, R.A. [1]

Sen, A.K. [1] [3?]

Long Term Capital Management, Greenwich, CT

Scholes, M.S.

Manchester University

Hicks, J.R. [3]

Lewis, W.A. [3]

Stiglitz, J.E. [4]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Akerlof, G.A. [1]

Aumann, R.J. [1]

Engle, R.F. [3]

Klein, L.R. [1]

McFadden, D.L. [3]

Merton, R.C. [1, 3]

Mirrlees, J.M. [3]

Modigliani, F. Modigliani, F. [3]

Mundell, R.A. [1]

Nash, J.F. [3]

Phelps, E. [3]

Samuelson, P.A. Samuelson, P.A. [3]

Scholes, M.S. [3]

Sen, A.K. [3]

Smith, V.L. [2]

Solow, R.M. Solow, R.M. [3]

Stiglitz, J.E. [1]

McGill University

41

Mundell, R.A. [3]

McMaster University

Scholes, M.S. [1]

New York University

Aumann, R. [3]

Engle, R.F. Engle, R.F. [3]

Hayek, F.A. [2]

Heckman, J. [2]

Koopmans, T.C. [3]

Leontief, W. [4]

Myrdal, G. [3]

Prescott, E.C. [4]

Samuelson, P.A. [4]

Oxford University

Hicks, J.R. Hicks, J.R. [1]

Klein, L.R. [3]

Meade, J.E. [1]

Mirrlees, J. [3]

Myrdal, G. [1]

Sen, A.K. [3]

Solow, R.M. [3]

Spence, A.M. [1]

Stiglitz, J.E. [3]

Princeton, Institute for Advanced Studies

Maskin, E.S.

Princeton University

Becker, G. [1?]

Heckman, J. [1?]

Kahneman, D. Kahneman, D. [3?]

Krugman, P. Krugman, P. [3?]

Lewis, W.A. Lewis, W.A. [3?]

Maskin, E [3?]

Nash, J.F. Nash, J.F [1, 3?]

Spence, M. [1?]

Purdue University

Smith, V.L. [3]

Rutgers University

Friedman, M. [1]

State University of New York at Buffalo

Coase, R.H. [3]

State University of New York at Stony Brook

Aumann, R.J. [3]

Stanford University

Arrow, K.J. [2, 3]

Debreu, G. [2]

Friedman, M. [3]

42

Harsanyi, J. [1]

Koopmans, T.C. [2]

North, D.C. [3]

Scholes, M. [3]

Sharpe, W.F. Sharpe, W.F. [3]

Smith, V.L. [3]

Spence, A.M. Spence, A.M. [3]

Stiglitz, J.E. [4]

Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm

Ohlin, B.

Swarthmore College

Prescott, E.C. [1]

University of Arizona

Smith, V.L. [3]

University of British Columbia

Mundell, R.A. [1]

University of Calcutta

Sen, A.K. [1]

University of California, Berkeley

Akerlof, G.A. Akerlof, G.A. [3]

Debreu, G. Debreu, G. [3]

Harsanyi, J.C. Harsanyi, J.C. [3]

Kahneman, D. [3]

Klein, L.R. [1]

McFadden, D.L. McFadden, D.L. [3]

North, D.C. [3]

Schelling, T. [1]

Sen, A.K. [2]

Simon, H. [3]

University of California, Los Andes

Sharpe, W. [1]

University of California, Santa Barbara

Kydland, F.E. Kydland, F.E. [3]

Prescott, E. [2]

University of California, San Diego

Engle, R. [3]

Granger, C.W.J. Granger, C.W.J. [3]

Markowitz, H.M. [3]

University of Chicago

Arrow, K.J. [2, 3]

Becker, G.S. Becker, G.S. [1]

Buchanan, J.M. [1]

Coase, R.H. Coase, R.H. [3]

Debreu, G. [3]

Fogel, R.W. Fogel, R.W. [3]

Friedman, M. Friedman, M. [1]

43

Haavelmo, T. [3]

Hayek, F.A. [3]

Heckman, J.L. Heckman, J.L. [3]

Hurwicz, L. [3]

Klein, L.R. [3]

Koopmans, T.C. [3]

Lucas, R.E. Lucas, R.E. [1]

Markowitz, H. [[1]

McFadden, D.L. [3]

Miller, M.H. Miller, M.H [3]

Mundell, R.A. [3]

Myerson, R/B. Myerson, R/B. [3]

Prescott, E.C. [3]

Samuelson, P.A. [1]

Scholes, M. [1]

Schultz, T.W. Schultz, T.W. [3]

Simon, H. [1]

Stigler, G.J. Stigler, G.J. [1]

University College Dublin

Heckman, J. [4]

University of Edinburgh

Mirrlees, J. [1]

University of Geneva

Allais, M. [3]

Myrdal, G. [3]

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Hurwicz, L. [3]

Modigliani, F. [3]

Tobin, J. [1]

University of Jerusalem

Aumann, R.J. Aumann, R.J. [3]

Kahneman, D. [1, 3]

University of Kansas

Smith, V.L. [1]

University of Leiden

Tinbergen, J.

University of Maryland

Schelling, T.C. Schelling, T.C. [3]

University of Melbourne

Granger, C.W.R. [3]

Mirrlees, J. [3]

University of Michigan

Klein, L.R. [4]

University of Minnesota

Friedman, M. [3]

Hurwicz, L. Hurwicz, L. [4]

44

McFadden, D. [1]

Prescott, E.C. [3]

Stigler, G.J. [3]

University of Nottingham

Granger, C. [1]

University of Oslo

Frisch, R. Frisch, R. [1]

Haavelmo, T. Haavelmo, T. [1]

University of Paris

Allais, M. [1]

Debreu, G. [1]

University of Pennsylvania

Klein, L.R. Klein, L.R. [4]

Kuznets, S. [4]

University of Pittsburgh

McFadden, D. [2]

University of Rochester

Fogel, R. [3]

University of Salzburg

Hayek, F.A.

University of Stockholm

Myrdal, G. .

University of Sydney

Harsanyi, J. [1]

University of Tennessee

Buchanan, J.M. [1]

University of Texas at Austin

Kydland, F.E. [2]

Myrdal, G. [4]

University of Warsaw

Hurwicz, L. [1]

University of Washington

Stigler, G.J. [1]

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Schultz, T.C. [1]

Utrecht University

Koopmans, T.C. [1?]

Washington University

North, D.C. North, D.C. [2]

45

Williams College

Engle, R.F. [1]

Yale University

Akerlof, G.A. [1]

Aumann, R. [2]

Debreu, G. [3]

Harsanyi, J. [2]

Heckman, J. [2]

Koopmans, T.C. Koopmans, T.C. [3]

Phelps, E. [1]

Schelling, T.C. [3]

Simon, H. [2]

Stiglitz, J.E. [2]

Tobin, J.

Vickrey, W. [1]

Sources: Extracted from ‘Nobel Laureates by University Affiliation’ at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_laureates_by_university_affiliation. Site accessed on 24/04/2008.

Notes: 1. Entries for five laureates were missing from the Nobel listing (Hayek, Lewis, Myrdal, Tinbergen and Tobin). I have

added the missing information from Vane and Mulhearn (2005) in italic, in both tables.

2. Detailed entries for three institutions (Humbolt University of Berlin, Princeton University and Utrecht University) were

missing from the Wikipedia listing. I have obtained the missing names from the relevant institutions websites and have

allocated numbers to the laureates using the Wikipedia criteria.

3. All the entries for the London School of Economics were listed under criterion [1], which is only correct for Hurwicz and

Mundell. I have corrected the remaining eight entries.

46

Table A2: Institutional Claims on Nobel Prize Winners in Economics

Nobel Listing Wikipedia Listing

Akerlof, G.A. (2001 J)

London School of Economics [1] [3?]

MIT [1]

University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley [3]

Yale University [1]

Allais, M. (1988)

École National Supérieur des Mines de Paris

École Polytechnique [1]

University of Geneva [3]

University of Paris [1]

Arrow, K.J. (1972 J)

City College of New York [1]

City University of New York [1]

Columbia University [1]

Harvard University Harvard University [3]

Stanford University [2, 3]

University of Chicago [2, 3]

Aumann, R.J. (2005 J)

City College of New York [1]

City University of New York [1]

MIT [1]

New York University [3]

State University of New York at Stony Brook [3]

University of Jerusalem University of Jerusalem [3]

Yale University [2]

Becker, G.S. (1992)

Columbia University [3]

Princeton University [1?]

University of Chicago University of Chicago [1]

Buchanan, J.M. (1986)

Center for Study of Public Choice, Fairfax, VA

George Mason University [3]

Florida State University [3]

University of Chicago [1]

University of Tennessee [1]

Coase, R.H. (1991)

London School of Economics [1] [1, 3?]

State University of New York at Buffalo [3]

University of Chicago University of Chicago [3]

Debreu, G. (1983)

Cambridge University [2]

École Normale Superieure [1]

Stanford University[2]

University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley [3]

47

University of Chicago [3]

University of Paris [1]

Yale University [3]

Engle, R.F. (2003 J)

Cornell University [1]

MIT [3]

New York University New York University [3]

University of California, San Diego [3]

Williams College [1]

Fogel, R.W. (1993 J)

Columbia University [1]

Cornell University [1]

Johns Hopkins University [1]

University of Chicago University of Chicago [3]

University of Rochester [3]

Friedman, M. (1976)

Columbia University [1, 2, 3]

Rutgers University [1]

Stanford University [3]

University of Chicago University of Chicago [1]

University of Minnesota [3]

Frisch, R. (1969)

University of Oslo University of Oslo [1]

Granger, C.W.J. (2003 J)

University of California, San Diego University of California, San Diego [3]

University of Melbourne [3]

University of Nottingham [1]

Haavelmo, T. (1989)

University of Chicago [3]

University of Oslo University of Oslo [1]

Harsanyi,J.C. (1994 J)

Stanford University [1]

University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley [3]

University of Sydney [1]

Yale University [2]

Hayek, F.A. (1974 J)

Albert Ludwigs University of Freiberg [3]

London School of Economics [1] [3?]

New York University [2]

University of Chicago [3]

University of Salzburg

Heckman, J.J. (2000 J)

Columbia University [3]

New York University [2]

Princeton University [1?]

University of Chicago University of Chicago [3]

University College Dublin [4]

48

Yale University [2]

Hicks, J.R. (1972 J)

Cambridge University [3]

London School of Economics [1] [3?]

Manchester University [3]

All Souls College, Oxford University Oxford University [1]

Hurwicz, Leonid (2007 J)

London School of Economics [1]

University of Chicago [3]

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [3]

University of Minnesota University of Minnesota [4]

University of Warsaw [1]

Kahneman, D. (2002 J)

Princeton University Princeton University [3?]

University of California, Berkeley [3]

University of Jerusalem [1, 3]

Kantorovich, L.V. (1975 J)

Academy of Science, Moscow

Klein, L.R. (1908)

MIT [1]

Oxford University [3]

University of Chicago [3]

University of Michigan [4]

University of Pennsylvania University of Pennsylvania [4]

Koopmans, T.C. (1975 J)

New York University [3]

Stanford University [2]

University of Chicago [3]

Utrecht University [1?]

Yale University Yale University [3]

Krugman, Paul (2008 )

Princeton University Princeton University [?]

Kuznets, S. (1971)

Columbia University [1]

Harvard University Harvard University [3]

Johns Hopkins University [3]

University of Pennsylvania [4]

Kydland, F.E. (2004 J)

Carnegie Mellon University

University of California, Santa Barbara University of California, Santa Barbara [3]

University of Texas at Austin [2]

Leontief, W. (1973)

Harvard University Harvard University [3]

Humboldt University of Berlin [1?]

New York University [4]

49

Lewis, W.A. (1979 J)

London School of Economics [1] [1, 3?]

Manchester University [3]

Princeton University Princeton University [3?]

Lucas, R.E. (1995)

University of Chicago University of Chicago [1]

Markowitz, H.M. (1990 J)

City University of New York City University of New York [3]

University of California, San Diego [3]

University of Chicago [1]

Maskin, E.S. (2007 J)

Harvard University[1]

Princeton, Institute for Advanced Studies Princeton University [3?]

McFadden, D.L. (2000 J)

MIT

University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley [3]

University of Chicago [3]

University of Minnesota [1]

University of Pittsburgh [2]

Meade, J.E. (1977 J)

Cambridge University Cambridge University [3]

London School of Economics [1] [3?]

Oxford University [1]

Merton, R.C. (1997 J)

Columbia University [1]

Harvard University

MIT [1, 3]

Miller, M.H. (1990 J)

Harvard University [1]

Johns Hopkins University [1]

London School of Economics [1]

University of Chicago University of Chicago [3]

Mirrlees, J.A. (1996 J)

Cambridge University Cambridge University [1, 3]

MIT [3]

Oxford University [3]

University of Edinburgh [1]

University of Melbourne [3]

Modigliani, F. (1985)

Columbia University [3]

MIT MIT [3]

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [3]

Mundell, R.A. (1999)

Columbia University Columbia University [3]

Johns Hopkins University [3]

London School of Economics [1]

50

McGill University [3]

MIT [3]

University of British Columbia [1]

University of Chicago [3]

Myerson, R.B. (2007 J)

Harvard University [1]

University of Chicago University of Chicago [3]

Myrdal, G. (1974 J)

New York University [[3]

Oxford University [1]

University of Geneva [3]

University of Stockholm

University of Texas at Austin [4]

Nash, J.F. (1994 J)

MIT [3]

Princeton University Princeton University [1, 3?]

North, D.C. (1993 J)

Stanford University [3]

University of California, Berkeley [3]

Washington University Washington University [2]

Ohlin, B. (1977 J)

Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm

Phelps, E.S. (2006)

Amherst College [1]

Columbia University Columbia University [3]

MIT [3]

Yale University [1]

Prescott, E.C. (2004 J)

Arizona State University Arizona State University [3]

Case Western Reserve University [1]

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Minneapolis

New York University [4]

Swarthmore College [1]

University of California, Santa Barbara [2]

University of Chicago [3]

University of Minnesota [3]

Samuelson, (P.A. 1970)

Harvard University [1]

MIT MIT [3]

New York University [4]

University of Chicago [1]

Schelling, T.C. (2005 J)

University of California, Berkeley [1]

University of Maryland

Yale University [3]

Scholes, M.S. (1997 J)

51

Long Term Capital Management, Greenwich, CT

McMaster University [1]

MIT [3]

Stanford University [3]

University of Chicago [1]

Schultz, T.W. (1979 J)

University of Chicago University of Chicago [3]

University of Wisconsin-Madison [1]

Selten, R. (1994 J)

University of Bonn

Sen, A.K. (1998)

Trinity College, Cambridge University Cambridge University [1, 2, 4]

Cornell University [3]

Harvard University [3]

London School of Economics [1] [3?]

Oxford University [3]

University of Calcutta [1]

University of California, Berkeley [2]

Sharpe, W.F. (1990 J)

Stanford University Stanford University[3]

University of California, Los Andes [1]

Simon, H.A. (1978)

Carnegie Mellon University

Illinois Institute of Technology [3]

University of California, Berkeley [3]

University of Chicago [1]

Yale University [2]

Smith, V.L. (2002 J)

California Institute of Technology [1]

George Mason University George Mason University [3]

Harvard University [1]

Purdue University [3]

Stanford University [3]

University of Arizona [3]

University of Kansas [1]

Solow, R.M. (1987)

Columbia University [2]

Harvard University [1]

MIT MIT [3]

Oxford University [3]

Spence, A.M. (2001 J)

Harvard University [3]

Oxford University [1]

Princeton University [1?]

Stanford University Stanford University [3]

Stigler, G.J. (1982)

Columbia University [3]

52

University of Chicago University of Chicago[1]

University of Minnesota [3]

University of Washington [1]

Stiglitz, J.E. (2001 J)

Amherst College [1]

Cambridge University [2]

Columbia University Columbia University [3]

Duke University [4]

Manchester University [4]

MIT [1]

Oxford University [3]

Stanford University [4]

Yale University [2]

Stone, R. (1984)

Cambridge University Cambridge University [1, 3]

Johns Hopkins University [3]

Tinbergen, J. (1969)

University of Leiden

Tobin, J. (1981)

Harvard University [1]

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [1]

Yale University

Vickrey, W. (1996 J)

Columbia University Columbia University [1, 3]

Yale University [1]

Source: Constructed by the author from the data presented in Table A.1.

Notes:

1. Entries for five laureates were missing from the Nobel listing (Hayek, Lewis, Myrdal, Tinbergen and Tobin). I have

added the missing information from Vane and Mulhearn (2005) in italic, in both tables.

2. Detailed entries for three institutions (Humbolt University of Berlin, Princeton University and Utrecht University) were

missing from the Wikipedia listing. I have obtained the missing names from the relevant institutions websites and have

allocated numbers to the laureates using the Wikipedia criteria.

3. All the entries for the London School of Economics were listed under criterion [1], which is only correct for Hurwicz and

Mundell. I have corrected the remaining eight entries.