Ben Bernanke shares Nobel Prize in Economics with two scientists

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Nobel Prize Medal: Three Americans awarded

Photo: Lovisa Engblom / DPA

This year's Nobel Prize in Economics goes to three US scientists.

Former central bank chief Ben Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig will be honored, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday in Stockholm.

You would be awarded "for research on banks and financial crises."

Last year, the US-based economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens were honored with the prestigious award.

The Nobel Prize winners in the categories of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were announced last week.

All of the Nobel Prizes this year are once again endowed with ten million Swedish crowns – that's currently the equivalent of almost 920,000 euros.

The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is the only one of the Nobel Prizes that does not go back to the will of Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), inventor of the dynamite and founder of the prize.

It has been donated by the Swedish Reichsbank since the late 1960s and is therefore, strictly speaking, not one of the classic Nobel Prizes.

Nevertheless, like the other Nobel prizes, it will be ceremoniously presented on the anniversary of Nobel's death, December 10th.

So far, scientists from the USA have been particularly frequently awarded with it.

The Bonn scientist Reinhard Selten has been the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics from Germany.

He shared the 1994 award with John Nash and John Harsanyi for their seminal contributions to non-cooperative game theory.