Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
The first prize in economics was awarded in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen "for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes". In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman awarded the prize.
Alvin Hansen
Hansen, in his review of "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money", was skeptical of John Maynard Keynes's propositions, but by December 1938, in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, he embraced Keynesian theories of the need for government intervention in periods of economic recession. Soon after his arrival at Harvard in 1937, Hansen's famous graduate seminar on fiscal policy began inspiring graduate students such as Paul Samuelson and James Tobin (both of whom would go on to win the Economics Nobel) to further develop and popularize Keynesian economics. Hansen's 1941 book, "Fiscal Policy and Business Cycles", was the first major work in the United States to entirely support Keynes's analysis of the causes of the Great Depression. Hansen used that analysis to argue for Keynesian deficit spending.
Hansen's best known contribution to economics was his and John Hicks' development of the IS-LM model, also known as the "Hicks–Hansen synthesis." The framework claims to graphically represent the investment-savings (IS) curve and the liquidity-money supply (LM) curve as an illustration of how fiscal and monetary policies can be employed to alter national income.