Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley win the Nobel prize for economics This year's list of favourites includes the American economists Robert Shiller, of Yale, who studies behavioural finance and the erratic movement of markets, Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, both at Harvard, who specialise in public debt, and Paul Romer, known for his work on different types of growth. The list of the world's most quoted economics researchers compiled by the US Federal Reserve features few Europeans. The Frenchman Olivier Blanchard, 63, ranks eighth. His role as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund is probably too political to make him a viable candidate for the prize. His compatriot Jean Tirole, from the Toulouse School of Economics, at number 11, is the highest placed out of those affiliated with a European university, but is considered too young at 59. My colleague Heather Stewart, the Observer's economics editor, has also looked at the runners and riders. She says Angus Deaton, a Brit based at Princeton, and Sir Tony Atkinson, of Nuffield College, Oxford, may be in the frame, for their work on inequality. It is notoriously hard to predict the laureate (s). Any guesses?