David A. Dickey

The work. The Dickey-Fuller test, built with his adviser Wayne Fuller, tells you whether a time series is a random walk or something that pulls back toward a trend. Every macro paper that touches a long series runs it.

The case for. Few statistical tools get used this often, and the committee likes methods that became infrastructure.

The case against. He is a statistician, not an economist, and time series econometrics already got its medal with Engle and Granger in 2003.

The KmikeyM angle. Eighteen years of KMIKEYM share prices is a time series, and the first honest question is whether that price has a unit root or just looks like one.