Three economists win the Nobel for their work on bank runs

When the global financial crisis struck 15 years ago, economists were forced to respond to criticism that they had, for decades, ignored the banking system. With its choices for this year’s Nobel prize, Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences honoured three economists who had, in fact, spent the previous decades examining bank instability. Research by Ben Bernanke, chair of the Federal Reserve during the crisis (and an academic before that), Douglas Diamond of the University of Chicago and Philip Dybvig of Washington University in St Louis was largely vindicated by the failure of the banks in 2008.