Three U.S.-based academics — David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens — won the Nobel Prize in economics Monday.

Card is a professor at UC Berkeley and Imbens at Stanford. Angrist teaches at MIT.

Card was honored “for his empirical contributions to labor economics.”

Angrist and Imbens share one half of the prize ““for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.”

Unlike the other Nobel prizes, the economics award wasn’t established in the will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel but by the Swedish central bank in his memory in 1968, with the first winner selected a year later. It is the final prize to be announced each year.

Last year’s economics award went to two Stanford University economists who tackled the tricky problem of making auctions run more efficiently.

It also created an endearing moment when one had to knock on the other’s door in the middle of the night to wake him up and tell him they had won.

Last week, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia for their fight for freedom of expression in countries where reporters have faced persistent attacks, harassment and even murder.

The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was recognized for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.”

The prize for physiology or medicine went to California scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.

Three scientists won the physics prize for work that found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including climate change.

Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan won the chemistry prize for finding an easier and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that can be used to make compounds, including medicines and pesticides.