Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig win the 2022 Nobel Prize in economics

Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig have won the 2022 Nobel prize in economics for their research on banks and financial crises.

The trio were selected for their research demonstrating that banks are very useful economic intermediaries but are only guaranteed to be stable if they are properly regulated.

Details of the award-winners were announced at a press conference on Oct. 10 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

Announcing the prize, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Hans Ellegren said: “We didn’t know it at the time, but 15 years ago much of the world stood at the brink of a devastating economic crisis.”

He added: “Many of us were unprepared for it, however, a few academic economists were both prepared and worried. They had studied they theory of bank runs, and they believed the evidence in its favor, and they suspected that the possibility of runs was yet again becoming evident.”

The Nobel prize in economics was established in 1969, and has been awarded 53 times to 89 laureates.