Previsões para o Nobel de Economia 2014

On Monday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will name its choice for the Nobel Prize in economics. In the run-up to that announcement, analysts and economists are engaged in some forecasting of their own about who might win.

The prize—officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel—was established in 1968 and is worth around $1.1 million. The shortlist seems to grow a little longer every year.

News and data firm Thomson Reuters publishes predictions every year of Nobel laureates based on the number of research citations those academics receive. This year, their frontrunners for the prize include Philippe Aghion of Harvard University and Peter Howitt of Brown University for their work advancing the growth theory of creative destruction.

William Baumol and Israel Kirzner, both of New York University, are also atop the Thomson Reuters slate for their research on entrepreneurship.

Tyler Cowen of George Mason University is also predicting Mr. Baumol—and possibly William Bowen, the former president of Princeton University—for their work on cost disease, or the phenomenon in which labor costs rise without a corresponding increase in output.

Mr. Baumol’s name comes up in a 1990 study by Eugene Garfield handicapping potential Nobel laureates-to-be. Garfield lists 50 of the most-cited economists between 1966 and 1985, of which 15 had already won the prize. Thomson Reuters notes that Mr. Baumol is 10th on that list, and that only one other economist—Martin Feldstein of Harvard University—is still living and has not won the prize.

Other perennial favorites for the study of economic growth include Paul Romer of NYU and Robert Barro of Harvard. Mr. Barro currently ranks No. 2 in research citations on a database maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, behind his Harvard colleague Andrei Shleifer.

If the Nobel committee looks to award work on finance and regulation, Jean Tirole at theToulouse School of Economics is often mentioned.

Income inequality has been a hot topic this year, and Oxford’s Sir Tony Atkinson andAngus Deaton of Princeton have in the past been seen as frontrunners in this strand of the economics field.

Thomson Reuters also tabs a sociologist—Mark Granovetter of Stanford University—on its list for his study that the role of social relationships and networks play “a larger role in transactions than admitted in idealized narratives of rational choice with perfect information.”

Since 2002, the Thomson Reuters exercise has identified 36 eventual Nobel laureates in economics, chemistry, physics and medicine. This year, one of the awardees for the Nobel in physics—Shuji Nakamura—had been tabbed by the Thomson Reuters analysis in 2002 as a potential winner.

The WSJ’s Jon Hilsenrath mused earlier this month about whether former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke might win for his work with NYU professors Mark Gertler andSimon Gilchrist, which looked at the damage done to the broader economy by convulsions in credit markets.

Last year, the prize went to a trio of American scholars—Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen of the University of Chicago and Robert Shiller of Yale University—for their complementary but independent work on asset-price analysis.

Fonte: aqui