Meet the Winner of Nobel Prize in Economic Science 2014

The Nobel Prize in Economic Science for the year 2014 was announced today. A French Economist was honored with this award this year. Jean Tirole, whose theories about the behavior of large companies underpin modern antitrust regulation, won this year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. 

This French professor of economics works on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and economics and psychology. He is the chairman of the board of the Jean-Jacques Laffont Foundation at the Toulouse School of Economics, scientific director of the Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI) in Toulouse and founding member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).  He said he was very grateful for the award for his work on “taming powerful firms”.

It was the first time in more than 30 years that the prize has been given for the study of regulation, a topic that has moved well beyond academia since the financial crisis.

At the core of Mr. Tirole’s work are models, often densely mathematical, that describe monopolies, oligopolies and markets. But he has also ranged widely across industries, among them payment cards and telecommunications, to produce studies of their particular function and dysfunction. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that Mr. Tirole, 61, had helped governments tame firms by analyzing when and how regulators should intervene to constrain activities, and when to stand back. 

Three American scientists Eugene F. Fama (University of Chicago, IL, USA),  Lars Peter Hansen (University of Chicago, IL, USA) and Robert J. Shiller (Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA)  won this award for the year 2013 for research that has improved the forecasting of asset prices in the long term and helped the emergence of index funds in stock markets, the award-giving body said. According to the committee, the economists' research "laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices."