Time to look foolish again.*
The announcement will be made in a few days.
I still think Jagdish Bhagwati is the top person without an award in an underrepresented field (trade).
There's a lot of talk about Sargent this year. I think I rank him even higher than most other folks. I don't think he'd win alone though. He could be paired with Barro (for new classical macro), with Sims (for dressing down simultaneous equation modeling), or with Hansen (for developing GMM). Frankly, I think any of those 4 could get it on their own if they live long enough.
There's also been a lot of talk about Martin Feldstein. Not this year - because of his association with AIG. Personally, I think he's overrated anyway - he has a huge cheering section from his former students. They've made enormous contributions on their own, but they don't give Nobel's for mentoring.
In the past, I've also expressed a soft spot for Dale Jorgenson.
There's also the really old guys who deserve it and might not be here next year: Arnold Harberger, or Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, or David Cass, Peter Diamond, Karl Shell, and Hirofumi Uzawa.
Here's a dark horse whose work might be recognized this year because it is fundamental to understanding financial bubbles: Philip Cagan.
Then there are some old standards: Fama and French, Dickey and Fuller, Johansen, Chow, Dixit and Helpman, and Romer.
Well ... I must sound like a Marxist ... covered most of the possibilities but didn't commit to any of them.
* There have been 4 awards since I started making predictions. Prescott and Kydland won in 2004 - I thought they would win eventually, but not while still so young. Aumann and Schelling won in 2005, and were not on my radar screen. Phelps won in 2006, and he was always high on my list but I thought the committee had passed him by. Last year, I had also given up on Hurwicz, but I had no clue that Maskin and Myerson were that big a deal.
