Who will win the 2026 Nobel Prize in economics?

The 2026 Nobel Prize in economics winner still isn’t known, with the announcement scheduled for Monday, and “Planet Money” and “The Indicator” planning coverage. Until then, the focus is on a “nerdy pastime”: reviewing economic research that hasn’t yet received a Nobel nod and trying to guess who could be selected. The official title—Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel—was created by Sweden’s central bank in 1968, not by Alfred Nobel’s will. The episode explains why committees often pick older researchers and sometimes reward both zeitgeist-relevant and highly technical work. To make guesses, it highlights markets as an information aggregator. In a prediction market for the 2026 Nobel, trading volume was about $11,000 as of Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 6. By comparison, Kalshi’s 2024 presidential election market recorded about $670 million, suggesting the Nobel market is too “thin” to be reliable.