Two American academics are among the three recipients of this year’s Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday morning that they had won the prestigious award “for explaining innovation-driven economic growth.”
Joel Mokyr, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, will receive half of the roughly $1.6 million award “for discovering the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological advancement.”
Peter Howitt, professor emeritus of economics at Brown University, will share the other half of the prize with Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France, INSEAD and the London School of Economics for “theories of sustained growth through creative destruction.”
“The work of the laureates shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted,” said John Hassler, chairman of the Economic Science Prize Committee. “We have to preserve the mechanisms behind creative destruction so that we don’t get stuck in stagnation.”
