I can’t believe there is much demand for it, but the online betting site Pinnacle Sports is taking wagers on this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. Here are the odds they are offering as of my writing this post:
101 Martin Feldstein +751
102 Thomas Sargent +1181
103 Robert Barro +1341
104 Paul Romer +1344
105 Jagdish Bhagwati +1359
106 Paul Krugman +1617
107 N. Gregory Mankiw +4310
108 Any other person -136
My hunch is that the bargain here is “any other person.” There is plenty of randomness in the choices each year, and this list excludes a number of people who I would think would be on the short list, e.g. Gene Fama, Peter Diamond, Oliver Hart, and Richard Posner, just to name a few.
I have a colleague who told me some time back that he had identified a strong leading indicator of economists who think they are on the short list for winning the prize: getting a haircut the week before the Nobel is announced. He claims to have many data points supporting his theory.
The economics Nobel is announced Monday. If I’m not mistaken, this very colleague is sporting a snazzy new haircut.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I think the vote for Mankiw is due to a) his public profile, on the blogs and in the Administration and b) his textbook.
If it’s possible, short him.
I would say Paul Romer, for his early work and not his developmental work (obviously). Baghwati and Krugman may win simultaneously on trade theory someday.
On the other hand Heaton, there are few upsides to those who don’t gamble.
I’m hoping for a swede
Thomson Reuters’s predictions for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics appear at: http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/nobel/nominees/#economics
I can’t comprehend why William Baumol (Princeton, NYU) has not yet won the Nobel. He is one of the greats of the 20th century and still great in the 21st. The scope of his scholarly output is awe inspiring. Perhaps that’s the problem. The Nobel Committee likes technicians, not Renaissance men or women.
Interesting that no one has even thought of naming someone who was faithful to Keynes’s analytical framework — although newspaper editorials around the world are calling for a return of Keynes’s economics in theie editorials , letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, and other articles– e.g., The Guardian, the New York Times, The Washington Post to name a few.
I bet on Janos Kornai of Hungary. A true maverick, Kornai developed critical models of centrally-planned economies. He’s a model of the kind of thinking we need more of as our current system morphs into something new.
Its hard to take these awards seriously. After all the great John Kenneth Galbraith was not nominated, and there so much politics involved.
Hernando de Soto?