The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 was awarded to Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”.
About the prize
In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) established the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize. The prize is based on a donation received by the Nobel Foundation in 1968 from Sveriges Riksbank on the occasion of the bank’s 300th anniversary. The first prize in economic sciences was awarded to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen in 1969.
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The prize in economic sciences is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden, according to the same principles as for the Nobel Prizes that have been awarded since 1901.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic 2023
Over the past century, the proportion of women in paid work has tripled in many high-income countries. This is one of the biggest societal and economic changes in the labour market in modern times, but significant gender differences remain. It was first in the 1980s that a researcher adopted a comprehensive approach to explaining the source of these differences. Claudia Goldin’s research has given us new and often surprising insights into women’s historical and contemporary roles in the labour market.
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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, founded in 1739, is an independent organisation whose overall objective is to promote the sciences and strengthen their influence in society. The Academy takes special responsibility for the natural sciences and mathematics, but endeavours to promote the exchange of ideas between various disciplines.
Prize in Economic Sciences 2023
This year’s Laureate in the Economic Sciences, Claudia Goldin, provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.
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Women are vastly underrepresented in the global labour market and, when they work, they earn less than men. Claudia Goldin has trawled the archives and collected over 200 years of data from the US, allowing her to demonstrate how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time.
Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.
“She uncovered key drivers of gender differences in the labour market“
During the twentieth century, women’s education levels continuously increased, and in most high-income countries they are now substantially higher than for men. Goldin demonstrated that access to the contraceptive pill played an important role in accelerating this revolutionary change by offering new opportunities for career planning.
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Despite modernisation, economic growth and rising proportions of employed women in the twentieth century, for a long period of time the earnings gap between women and men hardly closed. According to Goldin, part of the explanation is that educational decisions, which impact a lifetime of career opportunities, are made at a relatively young age. If the expectations of young women are formed by the experiences of previous generations – for instance their mothers, who did not go back to work until the children had grown up – then development, will be slow
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Historically, much of the gender gap in earnings could be explained by differences in education and occupational choices. However, Goldin has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is now between and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child.
Nobel Prize 2023 List
| Nobel Prize 2023 | Winner / Awarded to |
| The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 | Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman |
| The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 | Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier |
| The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023 | Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov |
| The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 | Jon Fosse |
| The Nobel Peace Prize 2023 | Narges Mohammadi |
| The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences 2023 | Claudia Goldin |