Nobel Prize: This year’s laureate in Economic Sciences announced

American Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences.

“The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes,” the organization posted on the social network X.

According to the Nobel Prize website, Claudia Goldin provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries.

“Understanding women’s role in the labour is important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin’s groundbreaking research we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future,” says Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.

Goldin has trawled the archives and collected over 200 years of data from the US, allowing her to demonstrate how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time, according to the press release.

Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve.

She also explained that the participation of married women in the labour market started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.

In addition, she demonstrated that access to the contraceptive pill played an important role in accelerating this revolutionary change by offering new opportunities for career planning. Also, according to Goldin, much of the gender gap in earnings could be explained by differences in education and occupational choices. However, Goldin has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is now between and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child.

As reported by Ukrinform, American scientists Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig won the 2022 Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences for research on banks and financial crises.

The Nobel Week continues in Sweden and Norway, during which the 2023 prize winners will be announced.

The Nobel Prize ceremony will take place at the Stockholm City Hall on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.