Jean Tirole wins Nobel prize for economics 2014

Jean Tirole has won the Nobel prize for economics 2014.

Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced that the French economics  professor had won the final prize of the 2014 Nobels at a ceremony on Monday.

“Jean Tirole is one of the most influential economists of our time,” the Academy said.

Tirole, of Toulouse University, won for his work on market power and regulation, and his work taming powerful firms.

Mr Tirole, the second Frenchman to win a Nobel award this year, is "one of the most influential economists of our time", the jury said.

"Many industries are dominated by a small number of large firms or a single monopoly," the jury said of Mr Tirole's work and went on to add that:

Left unregulated, such markets often produce socially undesirable results - prices higher than those motivated by costs, or unproductive firms that survive by blocking the entry of new and more productive ones ... Jean Tirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking. Drawing on these new insights, governments can better encourage powerful firms to become more productive and, at the same time, prevent them from harming competitors and customers.

"I'm really very grateful," Mr Tirole said.