Economist Joel Mokyr named a researcher of ‘Nobel Class’

Northwestern University economics professor Joel Mokyr today (Sept. 22) was named a 2021 Citation Laureate™, for his studies of the history and culture of technological progress and its economic consequences.

Mokyr is one of 16 researchers from around the globe whose work is deemed to be ‘of Nobel class,’ according to analysis by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™.

Each year since 2002, ISI analysts have drawn on Web of Science™ publication and citation data to identify influential researchers in the research areas of physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry and economics, to identify those individuals whose research publications are highly cited, and whose contributions to science have been extremely influential or transformative.

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor in the department of economics at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and co-director of Northwestern’s Center for Economic History at Northwestern. Mokyr’s research focuses on the economic history of Europe, with a specialization in the period of 1750–1914. His latest book, “A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy,” (Princeton University Press, 2016), questions the factors that made the Industrial Revolution possible and how culture — the beliefs, values, preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior — was a deciding factor in societal transformations.

Mokyr is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society as well as the British Academy, the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and the Dutch Royal Academy. He has been the president of the Economic History Association, editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History and a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. He was the 2006 winner of the biennial Heineken Award for History offered by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history.

Previous Northwestern faculty Citation Laureates include Charles F. Manski, Fraser Stoddard (also a Nobel Prize recipient in Chemistry, 2016), Chad Mirkin, Morten Meldal and Tobin Marks.

To date, 59 Citation Laureates listed in the Hall of Citation Laureates have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize. View the list of 2021 Citation laureates here.