The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded on 10 October to former Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and two other US academics whose work helped governments and central bankers navigate the global financial crisis and avoid an economic depression of the kind seen during the 1930s.

Bernanke, who served as chairman of the Fed during the crisis, is currently a distinguished senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His fellow recipients are Douglas Diamond, an economist at the University of Chicago, and Philip H. Dybvig, an economist at Washington University.