And the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in economics is … we don't know yet.That announcement is scheduled for Monday, and we'll be covering it here in the Planet Money newsletter and The Indicator podcast.In the meantime, the week before the announcement is a great time to partake in a nerdy pastime: remembering all the amazing economics research that hasn't yet gotten a Swedish medal, and guessing who might get the world's most coveted wake-up call.One quick note: The official name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
It's a mouthful, so we'll stick with "Nobel Prize in economics." Unlike the original Nobel Prizes, this one wasn't established by Alfred Nobel's will.Sweden's central bank created it in 1968 — a history we'll explore in a forthcoming episode of The Indicator.Many factors go into choosing a Nobel laureate.
Winners tend to be older, partly because the committee wants the passage of time to help them assess the candidates' impact on the field and/or broader world.Sometimes the committee picks research that speaks to the zeitgeist.
Other times it's because of very technical work that has given economists stronger empirical tools to study the world.So how might we make a guess? Well, there's one tool that economists love for making predictions: markets.Markets can aggregate the scattered information held by countless people, boiling down what they know about the world into a single number: a price — an idea famously articulated by economist Friedrich von Hayek, who, naturally, won a Nobel Prize back in 1974.Those prices can sometimes offer clues about the future.
For example, take the stock market.Many economists view it as a kind of giant information-processing machine.
In this view, a company's stock price reflects the crowd's beliefs about that company's future profits.It can provide a kind of crystal ball.
Although, of course, the crowd can be wrong.[ There is, of course, a classic Planet Money epis...