Nobel Prize for Economics is divided between one and two winners
Mokyr received half the prize, while Aghion and Howitt shared the rest (Photo: Royal Swedish Academy)
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to three researchers for their work on innovation-driven growth: Joel Mokyr (economic historian, Dutch, Israeli and American citizen, residing in the USA), Philippe Aghion (French, residing in France and London) and Peter Howitt (Canadian, residing in the USA), announced the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Monday afternoon local time, marking the end of this year’s Nobel Prize season.
Mokyr, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University, Israel, received half the prize for identifying the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress. He used historical sources to demonstrate why economic growth has become the norm in recent centuries, emphasizing the importance of scientific knowledge to explain how innovations work, as well as society’s openness to change and new ideas.
For their part, Aghion (from the Collège de France in Paris) and Howitt (professor at Brown University, in the United States) jointly received the other half for their theory of sustained growth through “creative destruction”. Their work, which includes a 1992 mathematical model that explains the process by which new and improved products cause losses in older companies, has shown that this process must be managed to prevent established companies from blocking innovation to protect their interests.
“The work of the laureates demonstrates that economic growth cannot be taken for granted. We must support the mechanisms underlying creative destruction to avoid stagnation,” said John Hassler, chairman of the committee that awards the Nobel Prize in Economics.
The prize is endowed with 11 million Swedish kronor (approximately one million euros) and, unlike the original Nobel Prizes, is sponsored by the Central Bank of Sweden. The delivery ceremony will take place on December 10th.
Last week the winners were announced in the medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace categories.
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