Sep 25, 2026

From the desk: the early coverage, and a source we are retiring

Two and a half weeks out, a model built from past winners forecasts information economics or game theory and puts Sanford Grossman first, at 4.4 percent. The IO case for Berry, Hausman and Pakes keeps getting made. Everything else is either last year's coverage or a list that includes past winners.

The desk read what exists so far. The markets and the citation counters have had their say (see this morning's Kalshi update). Here is everything else. None of it moves the board today. It is reading, not scoring.

The one real forecast: Richard Tol's model. On September 20, Richard Tol published a forecast from a model he built with coauthors that reconstructs past winners from citations, coauthors, students and the committee's habit of rotating between fields. It picks the field first: information economics, game theory, development or economic history, and less likely growth. Then it picks people, in this order: Sanford Grossman (4.4 percent), Barry Eichengreen, Robert Barro, Drew Fudenberg, Gene Grossman, Tim Besley, David Weil, Kevin Murphy, Kenneth French, and Gilles Saint-Paul (2.1 percent). He is the first to say how diffuse it is: 161 candidates, and even the leader is under one in twenty. Tol also admits he would give it to Jagdish Bhagwati and Anne Krueger, whom his own model ranks 151st and 152nd. Two things stand out to the desk. Barro is the only name on both Tol's list and Kalshi's. And the model does not have Athey, Varian, Woodford or Winter in its top ten, so the citation counters and the rotation model disagree completely.

The IO case keeps getting made. Nicholas Decker's Berry-Hausman-Pakes Should Win the Nobel Prize went up last September and was updated in March. The argument: Steven Berry, Jerry Hausman and Ariel Pakes built the tools that modern competition policy runs on. It is the prize the online conversation argues for most by name, and Pakes is also Kalshi's biggest single bet this season. Tol's model does not rate it: IO is not in its favored fields this year.

Last year's names, still circulating. Before the 2025 announcement, AFP's roundup tipped AI and inequality: Erik Brynjolfsson, Susan Athey, Marianne Bertrand with Sendhil Mullainathan, Saez, Piketty and Zucman, and the behavioral trio of Fehr, Loewenstein and Camerer. The prize went to Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt. Those names have not been retipped for 2026 in anything we can find yet, but expect the same AFP piece around October 10.

Handle with care. An "AI predictions" page still lists Acemoglu, Aghion and Duflo as 2026 contenders. All three have already won. We do not count it. Octagon's model page and the several sites that repackage Kalshi's odds add nothing that Kalshi itself does not show, and they often show the one-contract prints as though they were a price.

Retired: Cheap Talk. We listed the Kellogg blog's prediction pool as a source. The blog's newest post is from September 2019, and we can find no pool since. It never contributed a number, so nothing on the board changes. It comes off the sources page today.

What the desk watches next. HSE's open prediction contest usually opens in late September or early October. Tyler Cowen posts his list close to the day. Bookmaker odds for economics, if they come at all, come in the last two weeks. We check all three on October 1.

The board after this update

Contenders Strong work, right age, right timing.

#		Candidate	Field	Sources	Score
1	–	Susan C. Athey Stanford Graduate School of Business	Market design	2	51.0
2	–	Hal R. Varian University of California, Berkeley (emeritus); formerly Chief Economist, Google	Market design	1	42.9
2	–	Sidney G. Winter The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (emeritus)	Innovation and firms	1	42.9
2	–	Michael D. Woodford Columbia University	Monetary	1	42.9

Darkhorses Respected, lower probability, could surprise.

#		Candidate	Field	Sources	Score
5	–	Ariel Pakes Harvard University	Industrial organization	2	23.7
6	–	Robert J. Barro Harvard University	Macro	2	19.0
6	–	Richard Blundell University College London / Institute for Fiscal Studies	Labor	2	19.0
8	–	Ernst Fehr University of Zurich	Behavioral	2	18.6
9	–	Matthew Rabin Harvard University	Behavioral	2	18.1
10	–	Partha Dasgupta University of Cambridge	Environment	2	16.9

The Field On our radar. The live sources are not pricing them.

#		Candidate	Field	Sources	Score
11	–	Manuel Arellano CEMFI, Madrid	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	W. Brian Arthur Santa Fe Institute	Innovation and firms	1	14.3
11	–	David B. Audretsch Indiana University	Innovation and firms	1	14.3
11	–	David Autor MIT	Labor	1	14.3
11	–	Steven T. Berry Yale University	Industrial organization	1	14.3
11	–	Marianne Bertrand University of Chicago Booth School of Business	Labor	1	14.3
11	–	Jagdish Bhagwati Columbia University	Trade	1	14.3
11	–	Olivier Blanchard Peterson Institute for International Economics / MIT	Macro	1	14.3
11	–	Nicholas Bloom Stanford University	Macro	1	14.3
11	–	Steve Bond University of Oxford	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Samuel Bowles Santa Fe Institute	Behavioral	1	14.3
11	–	Colin Camerer California Institute of Technology	Behavioral	1	14.3
11	–	Raj Chetty Harvard University	Public economics	1	14.3
11	–	Wesley M. Cohen Duke University, Fuqua School of Business	Innovation and firms	1	14.3
11	–	Janet Currie Princeton University	Public economics	1	14.3
11	–	David A. Dickey North Carolina State University	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Avinash K. Dixit Princeton University	Trade	1	14.3
11	–	Kenneth R. French Dartmouth College (Tuck School of Business)	Finance	1	14.3
11	–	Wayne A. Fuller Iowa State University	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Jordi Galí CREI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona School of Economics	Monetary	1	14.3
11	–	Mark Gertler New York University	Monetary	1	14.3
11	–	Edward Glaeser Harvard University	Growth	1	14.3
11	–	Mark Granovetter Stanford University	Theory	1	14.3
11	–	Gene M. Grossman Princeton University	Trade	1	14.3
11	–	Robert E. Hall Stanford University / Hoover Institution	Macro	1	14.3
11	–	Jerry A. Hausman Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Elhanan Helpman Harvard University	Trade	1	14.3
11	–	David Forbes Hendry University of Oxford	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Søren Johansen University of Copenhagen	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Katarina Juselius University of Copenhagen	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Lawrence F. Katz Harvard University	Labor	1	14.3
11	–	Israel M. Kirzner New York University	Theory	1	14.3
11	–	Nobuhiro Kiyotaki Princeton University	Macro	1	14.3
11	–	David M. Kreps Stanford Graduate School of Business	Theory	1	14.3
11	–	Anne Osborn Krueger Johns Hopkins University	Political economy	1	14.3
11	–	Richard Layard London School of Economics	Behavioral	1	14.3
11	–	James A. Levinsohn Yale University	Industrial organization	1	14.3
11	–	Daniel A. Levinthal University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School	Innovation and firms	1	14.3
11	–	John A. List University of Chicago	Behavioral	1	14.3
11	–	George Loewenstein Carnegie Mellon University	Behavioral	1	14.3
11	–	Charles F. Manski Northwestern University	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Paolo Mauro International Finance Corporation	Political economy	1	14.3
11	–	Marc Melitz Harvard University	Trade	1	14.3
11	–	John H. Moore University of Edinburgh	Theory	1	14.3
11	–	Sendhil Mullainathan MIT	Behavioral	1	14.3
11	–	Kevin M. Murphy University of Chicago Booth School of Business	Labor	1	14.3
11	–	Stewart C. Myers MIT Sloan School of Management	Finance	1	14.3
11	–	Andrew J. Oswald University of Warwick	Behavioral	1	14.3
11	–	Sam Peltzman University of Chicago Booth School of Business	Industrial organization	1	14.3
11	–	Pierre Perron Boston University	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	M. Hashem Pesaran University of Southern California	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Peter C. B. Phillips Yale University	Econometrics	1	14.3
11	–	Thomas Piketty Paris School of Economics	Inequality	1	14.3
11	–	Richard Posner University of Chicago Law School	Industrial organization	1	14.3
11	–	Raghuram Rajan University of Chicago Booth School of Business	Finance	1	14.3
11	–	Carmen M. Reinhart Harvard Kennedy School	Macro	1	14.3
11	–	Kenneth S. Rogoff Harvard University	Macro	1	14.3
11	–	Ariel Rubinstein Tel Aviv University / New York University	Theory	1	14.3
11	–	Emmanuel Saez UC Berkeley	Inequality	1	14.3
11	–	John B. Taylor Stanford University (Hoover Institution)	Monetary	1	14.3
11	–	David J. Teece UC Berkeley	Innovation and firms	1	14.3
11	–	Gabriel Zucman Paris School of Economics / UC Berkeley	Inequality	1	14.3
73	–	Andreu Mas-Colell Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona School of Economics (emeritus)	Theory	1	4.3
74	–	Luigi Zingales University of Chicago Booth School of Business	Finance	1	2.6