Israeli-American among three awarded economics Nobel

By AP and ToI Staff 13 October 2025, 1:19 pm

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A screen shows (L-R) American-Israeli Joel Mokyr, France's Philippe Aghion and Canada's Peter Howitt during the announcement of the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 13, 2025 (Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP) / ALTERNATIVE CROP

Israeli-American economist Joel Mokyr is named as one of a trio of researchers awarded the Nobel prize in economics for “having explained innovation-driven economic growth.”

Mokyr, from Northwestern University, wins alongside Philippe Aghion from the College de France and the London School of Economics, and Peter Howitt from Brown University.

Born in The Netherlands, Mokyr was raised in Haifa and earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Jerusalem before moving to the US to continue his academic pursuits.

The Nobel committee says he “demonstrated that if innovations are to succeed one another in a self-generating process, we not only need to know that something works, but we also need to have scientific explanations for why.”

Aghion and Howitt also studied the mechanisms behind sustained growth, including in a 1992 article in which they constructed a mathematical model for what is called creative destruction: When a new and better product enters the market, the companies selling the older products lose out.

“The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted. We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation,” says the chair of the committee for the prize in economic sciences.