The 3rd or 4th Predict the Nobel Prize in Economics Competition

It’s that time of year again, where I (sometimes) remember to post the Vegas odds on the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Here are the venerable Thomson Reuters predictions:

• Joshua D. Angrist (MIT),  David Card (UC-Berkeley), and Alan Kreuger (Princeton) for their advancement of empirical microeconomics
• Sir David F. Hendry (Oxford), M. Hashem Pesaran (Cambridge), Peter C.B. Phillips (Yale) for their contributions to economic time-series, including modeling, testing and forecasting
• Sam Peltzman (Chicago) and Richard A. Posner (Chicago) for extending economic theories of regulation

 The Wall Street Journal fleshes out some of these predictions, and basically splashes a who’s who on the Large Guns in the profession.  Here is a taste: 

If the award is for work on financial crises, banks, liquidity and regulation,Douglas Diamond of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business andPhilip Dybvig, of the Olin School of Business at Washington University, St. Louis, are headliners. In 1983, the pair wrote a seminal paper spelling out why bank runs happen. The authors explained that deposit insurance could reassure customers and keep them from panicking and pulling their money out en masse.

Who knows?   I seriously doubt Peltzman and Posner would get it, though now that Posner has backed off some of his more severe positions, perhaps he’ll get a look.  Peltzman has been a very influential empirical economist, so it is conceivable that he would wind up in that first group.

Daron Acemoglu seems a bit young, though he is a clear future favorite, so I will go with the indomitable Philippe Aghion. 

Send me your picks or put them in the comments.