Turkish-born Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson won the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize for research into differences in prosperity between nations, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday.
The three economists "have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country's prosperity," the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
"Societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better. The laureates' research helps us understand why," it added.
Acemoğlu and Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Robinson conducts his research at the University of Chicago.
"Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time's greatest challenges. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for achieving this," said Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.
The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.
Though Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, it is always presented together with the others on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
The prestigious award is the final prize to be given out this year and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
Past winners include a host of influential thinkers such as Milton Friedman, John Nash – played by actor Russell Crowe in the 2001 film "A Beautiful Mind" – and, more recently, former U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) Chair Ben Bernanke.
Last year, Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin won the prize for her work highlighting the causes of wage and labor market inequality between men and women.
The economics prize has been dominated by U.S. academics since its inception, while U.S.-based researchers also tend to account for a large portion of winners in the scientific fields.
Nobel honors were announced last week in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.
U.S. scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the prize for medicine, while Japan's Nihon Hidankyo, an organization of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who campaigned for the abolition of nuclear weapons, won the award for peace.