Bernanke, Diamond and Dybvig, winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics

MADRID, 10 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The American economists Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig have been awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize for Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics, as announced on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has highlighted the awarding of the prize to the three experts "for their research on banks and financial crises", noting that their work has significantly improved the understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises , as well as the importance of "why it is vital to avoid bank collapses".

In this sense, the Academy has underlined the great practical importance of the analysis carried out by the three economists, who established the foundations of their research in the early 1980s, to regulate financial markets and deal with financial crises.

Ben Bernanke, who chaired the US Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014 and led the world's largest economy's monetary response to the financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession in 2008, is famous for his analysis of the Great Depression of the 1990s. 1930, the worst economic crisis in modern history.

"Among other things, it showed how the banking panic episodes were a decisive factor for the crisis to become so deep and prolonged. (...) The capacity of society to channel savings towards productive investments was thus severely diminished" , explained the Academy.

The Nobel Prize in Economics is not part of Alfred Nobel's legacy, since it was established in 1968 by the Riksbanken, the Swedish central bank, coinciding with the entity's 300th anniversary, and was awarded for the first time in 1969, honoring the Norwegian Ragnar Frisch and Dutchman Jan Tinbergen.

The amount of the full prize amounts to a total of 10 million Swedish crowns (914,000 euros).