Angus Deaton won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.
Deaton’s research connected large economic questions with detailed evidence about household behavior. He developed methods for understanding how consumers divide spending among goods and how demand changes when prices or incomes change.
His work also improved the measurement of poverty and welfare, especially by emphasizing the importance of reliable household data. Consumption patterns can reveal living standards and economic inequality, but comparisons require care because prices, household size, and local conditions differ.
The 2015 prize went to Deaton alone. Amartya Sen also made major contributions to welfare economics and poverty analysis, while Joseph Stiglitz was recognized in 2001 for asymmetric information. These overlapping subjects make the laureates easy to confuse, but their Nobel citations were different.