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.

The award for economics is the final instalment of this year’s crop of Nobels that have seen prizes go to Covid-19 vaccine discoveries, atomic snapshots and “quantum dots” as well as to a Norwegian dramatist and an Iranian activist.

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 and, more recently, US economist Paul Krugman.

Last year, a trio of US 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.