|
News | Web Resources | Yellow Pages | Free Advertising | Chat
Bangladesh |
Immigration |
E-cards |
Horoscope |
Matrimonial |
|
Change Your Life! |
Two Americans win the Nobel Prize in economics |
|
News
|
|
|
October 12, 2000
STOCKHOLM (AP) - Two Americans won the Nobel Prize in economics Wednesday for developing theories on how people work and live, contributing greatly to changes in wage analysis and transportation and communication systems. James J. Heckman, 56, of the University of Chicago and Daniel L. McFadden, 63, of the University of California at Berkeley, were cited for their theories and methods in statistical analysis that have had wide-ranging practical applications, according to the citation by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. McFadden's work laid the foundation for an economic theory by which individuals choose their place of occupation or residence, leading among other things to the San Francisco BART transportation system and investments in phone service and housing for the elderly. An example of McFadden's work in environmental economics was his study in the 1990s of welfare losses due to the damage from the Exxon Valdez oil spill on the Alaskan coast. "This study provides yet another example of McFadden's masterly skill in integrating economic theory and econometric methodology in empirical studies of important social problems," the citation said. Heckman's methodological breakthroughs regarding self-selection in the mid-1970s showed a correlation between education and wages. "With the help of Heckman's models, you can figure out what effects one year of education will have on wages, and one can study the differences in wages between men and women given a certain education and age," said Karl-Gustav Joereskog, a member of the academy. The prize is worth 9 million kronor (dlrs 915,000) this year. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics - the fourth in a week of awards - was established outside Alfred Nobel's will to mark the 1968 tricentennial of Sweden's central bank. The bank determined that "Nobel prize rules ... will be honored" in the memorial award. Canadian economist Robert A. Mundell won last year's economics prize for his innovative analysis of exchange rates helped lay the intellectual groundwork for Europe's common currency. On Tuesday, the Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry were won by six scientists who helped bring about the Information Revolution of ever-smaller and faster personal computers, pocket calculators, cell phones, CD players, lifelike TV screens and Gameboys. The physics prize went to Jack Kilby, who invented the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in 1958, and two physicists whose work contributed to satellite and cell phone technology: Herbert Kroemer of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Zhores Alferov of the A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technico Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. The chemistry prize went to Alan Heeger, 64, of the University of California-Santa Barbara, Alan MacDiarmid, 73, of the University of Pennsylvania and Hideki Shirakawa, 64, of the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The three modified plastics so they can conduct electricity; the pioneering work with "brilliant plastics" could someday lead to computers as small and light as a wristwatch. This year's medicine prize went to Arvid Carlsson of Sweden and Americans Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel for discoveries about how messages are transmitted between brain cells, leading to treatments of Parkinson's disease and depression. Carlsson, 77, a professor emiritus of the University of Goteborg in Sweden, Greengard, 74, of Rockefeller University in New York and Kandel, 70, an Austrian-born U.S. citizen with Columbia University in New York shared the prize. The literature award will be announced Thursday and the peace prize, the only one awarded in Oslo, Norway, will be announced Friday. The prizes always are presented Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896. |