Thanks to James DeRossitt for the following additional information:

“I was surprised to learn that, strictly speaking, there really is not a Nobel Prize in Economics. The prize was created by the Bank of Sweden in 1968, long after the other prizes were endowed (in 1901). The official name of the prize is ‘The Bank of Sweden Prize for Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel.’ Although it is not a Nobel Prize, the Bank of Sweden persuaded the Nobel Foundation to administer the prize along with the ‘real’ Nobel Prizes, effectively obscuring the distinction between the real Nobel Prizes and the Economics prize.

“This article (published around the time the awards were made in 2002) makes the interesting case that the endowment of this award was a clever gambit to lend legitimacy to the field of economics, ‘a move aimed at enforcing the dominant status of economics as a “hard” science not only among the disciplines of the social sciences, but first and foremost in the mind of the public and its elected representatives.’”