The Nobel Prize Committee has awarded the 2015 Nobel in Economic Sciences to Angus Deaton of Princeton University, "for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare."
You can watch the live event here, on streaming video; we'll update this post as the news emerges from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden.
The full name of the award is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences. Deaton won, the committee says, for asking three key questions:
- How do consumers distribute their spending among different goods?
- How much of society's income is spent and how much is saved?
- How do we best measure and analyze welfare and poverty?
Deaton's use of household surveys "has helped transform development economics from a theoretical field based on aggregate data to an empirical field based on detailed individual data," the committee says.
Last year's winner of the economics Nobel was Jean Tirole "for his analysis of market power and regulation." The French economist, born in 1953, is the author of several influential texts, including 1988's The Theory of Industrial Organization.
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