Joel Mokyr, a professor at Northwestern University in the United States who won this year's Nobel Prize in economics, is a world-renowned scholar in economic history. He teaches economics and history at Northwestern University. Mokyr has studied how the evolution of technology and knowledge has affected economic growth.
Mokyr traced the causes of the Industrial Revolution not to simple technological innovation but to the knowledge culture and diffusion of ideas of the Enlightenment.
In his representative books, "The Culture of Growth" and "A Culture of Improvement," he analyzed how Europe's intellectual environment fostered economic development.
Co-recipients Philippe Aghion, a professor at Collège de France, and Peter Howitt, a professor at Brown University in the United States, are economists representing the "New Growth Theory." They jointly developed a growth model based on "creative destruction," emphasizing that technological innovation and competition among corporations are the key drivers of economic growth.
Aghion, who is from France, once served as an economic adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron. He integrated Joseph Schumpeter's concept of "creative destruction" into modern growth theory and argued that corporations' innovation activities are central to economic growth.
Aghion viewed the role of government not as a mere regulator but as an architect that induces innovation and maintains market dynamism. He argued that through this process, societies should pursue sustainable and inclusive growth.
Peter Howitt, an emeritus professor at Brown University, published the "sustainable growth through creative destruction" theory with Aghion in 1992.
Their research is credited with supplementing the limits of the existing Paul Romer–style growth theory. The two demonstrated that corporations invest strategically in R&D to obtain monopoly profits, resulting in innovation and economic growth. In particular, by highlighting that competition among corporations spurs technological progress and increases consumer welfare, their work is characterized by its emphasis on market dynamism.
Howitt, an emeritus professor, also emphasized the importance of human capital and explained theoretically that education and technological infrastructure are the foundations of growth.