Americans win Nobel in economics

American university professors Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller were awarded the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday for their work in anticipating the performance of financial assets.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize, hailed the three for their findings on "their empirical analysis of asset prices."

"There is no way to predict the price of stocks and bonds over the next few days or weeks. But it is quite possible to foresee the broad course of these prices over longer periods, such as the next three to five years. These findings, which might seem both surprising and contradictory, were made and analyzed by this year’s laureates, Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller," the academy said in a statement (PDF).

Fama and Hansen teach at the University of Chicago. Shiller teaches at Yale University.

The Nobel committees have now announced all six of the annual $1.2 million awards for 2013. Four other Americans won Nobel prizes this year, in medicine and chemistry.

The economics award is not a Nobel Prize in the same sense as the medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and peace prizes, which were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in 1895. Sweden's central bank established the economics prize in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel.

Al Jazeera with wire services