Jordi Galí, Olivier Blanchard and Michael Woodford, winners of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award

Three-way tie for the top spot. The Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, given each year by the BBVA Foundation, has been awarded to three prestigious economists, well known in their field (and not only). They are the Frenchman Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and from 2008 to 2015 a professor at universities such as Harvard and MIT; the Catalan Jordi Galí, researcher at CREI, professor at UPF and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics; and the American Michael Woodford, currently professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, known for their research in monetary policy.

The three winners have studied the impact of economic policies on regulating activity cycles

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award is often considered the precursor to the Nobel Prize. In fact, the jury includes Eric Maskin, who won the Swedish Academy Prize in 2007. The award, which is now in its 17th edition, recognizes these three economists for their “profound influence” on modern macroeconomics and the design of fiscal monetary policy rules to study fluctuations in the business cycle. The jury recognizes them as “central architects of the neo-Keynesian paradigm” for having integrated “monopolistic competition and nominal and real rigidities in dynamic general equilibrium models with rational expectations.”

Jordi Galí (Barcelona, ​​1961) said that his research had contributed to creating a “conceptual framework for developing policies that tend to stabilise the economy”, especially in complex situations such as the financial crisis or the recent inflationary crisis.

Olivier Blanchard (Amiens, France, 1948) stressed that, unlike in past crises, today's central banks have acquired great credibility, which has prevented second-round effects during the recent episodes of inflation following the war in Ukraine.

As for Michael Woodford, his most influential work is the textbook “Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy”, which has become a standard reference in the field of monetary policy.