The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science: Network of doctoral advisors
Introduction
Every year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially known as The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to researchers in the field of economic sciences. Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen were the first recipients of the prize in 1969.
The award is presented in Stockholm at the annual Nobel Awards ceremony on December 10. As of this year, 2018, 81 individuals have received the prize. The analysis below explores the network between recipients of the award and their doctoral advisors starting with the data reported here.
Getting data
The list of the award recipients was first accessed from Wikipedia using rvest package in R. From the above page, the Wikipedia page of each recipient was accessed to get details such as doctoral advisor, influences, doctoral students and influencers. The analysis below uses the data for doctoral advisors for each recipient, if such information is available. At the time of this analysis the doctoral advisors for 16 laurates was not available hence excluded from the network analysis.
Exploring the data
Number of recipients by year
The graph below gives the summary of the number of recipients for each year.
Half of the time 50%, only one recipient is awarded the prize as presented below.
Number of recipients by country
A summary of the number of recipients by country is presented below. Most of the recipients, 59.3% are
citizens of the United States with 7.4% of the recipients being United Kingdom citizens. Several of the recipients are citizens have dual citizenship.
Network of recipients and doctoral advisors
The data was organized in two files, links and attributes data. The links data file contained two columns of the laurates and their doctoral advisors. A link is defined from the laurate to the doctoral adivisor. A sample of the first 5 cases of the links table is as below. The attributes data file has details about all the individuals in the network. The key variable defined in this data file is a distinction of whether an individual is a nobel laurate or not.
| Laureate | Doctoraladvisor |
|---|---|
| Jan Tinbergen | Paul Ehrenfest |
| Paul Samuelson | Joseph Schumpeter |
| Simon Kuznets | Wesley Clair Mitchell |
| Kenneth Arrow | Harold Hotelling |
| Wassily Leontief | Ladislaus Bortkiewicz |
Complete network
The graph below shows the interaction between Nobel laurates in economic sciences with their doctoral advisors. Recipients of the award are colored in red while non-recipients are colored in blue. The arrows point to the doctoral adivor of the recipient. From the graph, it is notable that some doctoral students of earlier recipients also were awarded the nobel prize. Key among the doctoral advisors whose doctoral students also won the award later on are; Wassily Leontief, Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow.
Largest connected component
The largest connected component of the complete network above was extracted and presented below. 18 of the 25 (72%), individuals in the connected component are all recipients of the award!! From Wassiley Leontief, there are two generations of recipients where some of his doctoral students (Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson and Thomas C Schelling) won the award and so did some of their students.
