Former Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke along with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig won the 2022 Nobel Economics Prize “for research on banks and financial crises”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.
"Ben Bernanke in a paper from the 1983 showed with statistical analysis, and historical sources, that bank runs led to bank failures and this was the mechanism that turned a relatively ordinary recession into the depression in the 30s, the world's most dramatic, and, severe crisis that we have seen in the modern history,” said John Hassler, member of committee for the Nobel Prize for Economics.
The trio join such luminaries as Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman, previous winners of the prize.
Last year, half of the 2021 economics prize went to Canadian-born David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, for his was awarded half of the prize for his research on how various issues, including minimum wage, impact the labor market. The other half went to Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dutch-born Guido Imbens from Stanford University for their development of novel methodologies to analyze natural experiments.
The majority of previous laureates have been from the United States. Only two women have ever won, Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.
The economics prize is not one of the original five awards created in the 1895 will of industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.
It was established by Sweden's central bank and first awarded in 1969, its full and formal name being the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.