2 MIT professors awarded Nobel prize in economics Boston 25 News [Video]

BOSTON — Two MIT professors have won the Nobel Prize in economics.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson PhD ‘89 were awarded the prize on Monday for research that explains why societies with poor rule of law and exploitative institutions do not generate sustainable growth.

The economists “have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at the announcement in Stockholm.

“I am delighted. It is a real shock and amazing news,” Acemoglu told the committee by phone at the Nobel announcement.

According to MIT, Acemoglus’s long-term research collaboration with Johnson has empirically supported the idea that government institutions that provide individual rights, especially democracies, have spurred greater economic activity over the last 500 years.

Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT and Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of …