The Harvard professor is only the third woman to win the prestigious prize, following Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.
American economic historian Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel economics prize for “having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on October 9. The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the last of this year’s crop of Nobel prizes and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($999,137).
Goldin, a professor at Harvard University, is only the third woman to win the prize, following Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.
“Understanding women’s role in the labour market is important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin’s groundbreaking research, we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future,” said Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.
Nobel Prizes awardees in 2023
The award for economics is the final instalment of this year’s crop of Nobel Prizes that have gone to COVID-19 vaccine discoveries, atomic snapshots, and “quantum dots” as well as to a Norwegian dramatist and an Iranian activist.
On October 2, Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine. The physics prize went to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini, and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz on October 3.
U.S. scientists Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov won the chemistry prize on October 4. They were followed by Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who was awarded the prize for literature. And on October 6, jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi won the peace prize.
Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences
The economics prize is not one of the original prizes for science, literature, and peace created in the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, but a later addition established and funded by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.
The first economics prize was awarded the following year and past winners include a host of influential thinkers and academics such Friedrich August von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Amartya Sen, Abhijit Banerjee, and, more recently, economist Paul Krugman.
In 2022, a trio of U.S. economists including former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke won for their research on how regulating banks and propping up failing lenders with public cash can stave off an even deeper economic crisis, like the Great Depression of the 1930s.
(with inputs from Reuters, AP, AFP, and Bloomberg)
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