French economist Jean Tirole has won the Nobel prize for economics for his research on market power and regulation.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Mr Tirole for clarifying “how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms”.

Mr Tirole (61) works at the Toulouse School of Economics in France.

“From the mid-1980s and onwards, Jean Tirole has breathed new life into research on such market failures,” the academy said, adding his work has strong bearing on how governments deal with mergers or cartels and how they should regulate monopolies.

The academy added: “In a series of articles and books, JeanTirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking.” The economics prize completed the 2014 Nobel Prize announcements.

Last week, different panels of Nobel judges announced the awards for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and the Nobel Peace Prize. The awards will be presented on December 10th, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Even though the economics award is not an original Nobel Prize — it was added in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank — it is presented with the others and carries the same prize money.

Last year the economics prize went to three Americans who shed light on the forces that move stock, bond and home prices.