Two Americans and a British-Cypriot have been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for economics for their work on explaining how unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and policy.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the 10 million Swedish crown (€1 million) prize recognised Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides "for their analysis of markets with search frictions".
"The laureates' models help us understand the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy," it said.
Prof Pissarides (62), is a professor at the London School of Economics, Mr Diamond (70), is an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while Prof Mortensen (71), is an economics professor at Northwestern University in Illinois.
The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968. It is not part of the original group of awards set out in dynamite tycoon Nobel's 1895 will.