Nobel Prize in Economics awarded for innovation-driven growth

Stockholm, Oct. 13 — The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2025 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday to three researchers, Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, recognizing their work explaining innovation driven economic growth, the academy said in Stockholm.

Mokyr, of Northwestern University, Aghion, of the Collège de France and the London School of Economics, and Howitt, of Brown University, were cited for analyses showing how technological change and the diffusion of ideas drive long term growth and why those processes sometimes stall. The committee highlighted Mokyr’s research on how scientific explanations enable successive innovations to build on one another, and noted Aghion and Howitt’s theoretical work, including a 1992 model, that formalized the concept of creative destruction, by which new products and firms displace older ones.

The committee emphasized that growth is not automatic and depends on institutions and mechanisms that allow innovation to emerge and diffuse. "We must uphold the mechanisms that underly creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation," said Hassler, chair of the committee for the prize in...