RBI economist predicted Nobel winner

MUMBAI: Every year, in the run-up to the announcement of the Nobel prizes in early October, expectations build up in the academic circles around the world about the probable winners. Several betting sites also join in the frenzy and add fuel to the speculation. This year too, ahead of the announcement of Nobel Prize in Economics on Monday afternoon, there was speculation and betting. Like other years, most names on such lists missed out on the most coveted prize in economics this time. However, a senior researcher with the Reserve Bank of India, which put out a list of probable winners two months ago, hit the jackpot.

On August 12 this year, RBI published a paper titled 'Beautiful Minds: The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics', authored by Saibal Ghosh, an assistant adviser in its department of economic and policy research. The paper listed 30 probable winners for the most coveted prize in the field of economics. And Angus Deaton, the Princeton professor who won the prize and nearly a million dollars with it, was ninth on the list of Ghosh's probable winners.

Ghosh, an economist-cum-central banker and an alumnus of Delhi School of Economics, based his findings of potential Nobel Prize winners by estimating their achievements from their fame, where the number of citations on Microsoft Academic Search is taken as the proxy for fame. He used a mathematical model for his clues to future Economics Nobel winners.

Others on his list were India's Jagadish N Bhagwati at number 23, Jeffrey Sachs at number 5 and Lawrence Summers at number 7, all globally known economists in their own right. Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer topped Ghosh's list while Anne Krueger, a former World Bank chief economist and now a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in the US, was ranked at 30.