Another Nobel for Time Series Econometrics?

Thomson Reuters makes annual Nobel Prize forecasts in chemistry, physics, medicine and economics, based on citation counts from its Web of Science database (no surprise). Of course the exercise is largely a marketing tool for their database, but it's still fun and timely.

They boast that their algorithm "has accurately forecast 27 winners since its inception in 2002." It's not clear how to interpret that statement, and whether the algorithm's performance is nearly as impressive as the statement suggests. (Each year they forecast several prizes, typically shared two or three ways, in each of the fields. If I'm guessing correctly, they score a "correct forecast" whenever the name of any current winner appeared at any earlier time as part of any of their forecasted prizes.)

Anyway, as I said, it's still fun and timely. This year they identify three top candidate prizes in economics:

David Hendry, Hashem Pesaran and Peter Phillips: For their contributions to economic time-series, including modeling, testing and forecasting

Josh Angrist, David Card and Alan Krueger: For their advancement of empirical microeconomics

Sam Peltzman and Richard Posner: For extending economic theories of regulation.

Quite a fine collection!