Former Harvard professor among winners of Nobel economics prize

Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt won the Nobel memorial prize in economics Monday for “having explained innovation-driven economic growth” including the key principle of creative destruction.

The winners represent contrasting but complementary approaches to economics. Mokyr is an economic historian who delved into long-term trends using historical sources, while Howitt and Aghion relied on mathematics to explain how creative destruction works.

Dutch-born Mokyr, 79, is from Northwestern University; Aghion, 69, from the Collège de France and the London School of Economics; and Canadian-born Howitt, 79, from Brown University.

Between 2000 and 2015, Aghion was a professor of economics at Harvard University. Before that, he briefly worked as an assistant professor at MIT after