Why the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt

Why the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt

October 13, 2025 – 08:02

The economists received the award for their work “explaining economic growth driven by innovation.”

AFP

The Royal Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Economics 2025 to the American-Israeli Joel Mokyrinto French Philippe Aghion and the Canadian Peter Howitt for his work on the impact of technology on economic growth.

“During the last two centuries, for the first time in history, the world experienced sustained economic growth. This lifted large numbers of people out of poverty and laid the foundations for our prosperity. This year’s winners in economic sciences explain how innovation drives greater progress,” said the jury that recognized the specialists with the award.

The reason why the Nobel Committee awarded them the prize was largely due to the work of Mokyr, who used historical sources to discover the causes of sustained growth and “demonstrated that, for innovations to occur in a self-generated process, we not only need to know that something works, but also have scientific explanations as to why.”

For its part, Aghion and Howittin 1992 they published an article where they built a mathematical model for the so-called creative destruction: When a new and improved product enters the market, companies selling older ones lose out. Given this, they explained: “Innovation represents something new and, therefore, is creative. However, it is also destructive, since the company whose technology becomes obsolete is overtaken by the competition.”

Nobel Economics 2025

The researchers received the award for their work on the impact of technology on economic growth.

The researchers received the award for their work on the impact of technology on economic growth.

Who are the winners

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics distinguished three researchers with very different trajectories and origins from each other, but with something in common: they were interested in the advancement of society in a sustained way.

Joel Mokyr was born in 1946 in Leiden, Netherlands. He received his doctorate from Yale and works as a professor at Northwestern University, in the USA. He specialized in economic history, with an emphasis on how knowledge and scientific development became engines of growth.

Besides, Philippe Aghion He is originally from Paris, where he was born in 1956. He received his PhD from Harvard and has teaching and research experience at the Collège de France, INSEAD, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Finally, Peter Howitt was born in Canada in 1946, earned his PhD from Northwestern University, and is a professor at Brown University. Together, Aghion and Howitt formed an academic alliance, publishing joint work that influenced views on competition and innovation.


Source: Ambito

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