Mr James Heckman and Mr Daniel McFadden, both from the US, won the Nobel Prize for Economics for work in the field of microeconometrics. The Nobel committee gave the prize "to James Heckman for his development of theory and methods for analysing selective samples and to Daniel McFadden for his development of theory and methods for analysing discrete choice".

Microeconometrics, a methodology for studying micro data, straddles the fields of economics and statistics. Mr Heckman (56) is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago in Illinois, while Mr McFadden (63) holds the E Morris Cox Chair in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. The economics prize was created by the Swedish central bank in commemoration of its tercentenary in 1968, and first awarded in 1969.