Who will win the Nobel Prize in economics?

Posted By Blake Hounshell Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 3:30 PM Share

InTrade has set up a betting market for the Nobel Prizes for economics and peace. The peace prize winner will be announced on Friday, with economics to follow on Monday.

I'm not sure where people are getting their information, but the consensus among InTrade users seems to be that Al Gore is the overwhelming favorite, followed by Inuit climate-change activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri, and veteran negotiator and former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari.

The economics field appears wide open, with no prospective candidate trading at more than 10 points (100 means that those betting believe there is a 100 percent chance that a given person will be named). Here are the top five:

University of Chicago finance professor Eugene Fama
Harvard economist Robert Barro
University of Toulouse economist Jean Tirole
Avinash Dixit of Princeton
George Mason's Gordon Tullock

Harvard economist and former Bush administration official Greg Mankiw also handicaps the prize based on which economists are cited most often. "[I]f I had to bet a dollar on this year's prize," Mankiw writes, "I would put it on Fama, [Harvard's Marty] Feldstein, or Barro."

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