The Nobel Committee said it awarded President Obama the Peace Prize in part for his ability to instill people with hope for the future. With the global economy looking particularly dismal, observers are wondering how much Monday’s announcement of the prize in economic sciences will reflect the events of the past year – and acknowledge work that promises to help policymakers prepare for future crises.

Who are the candidates for the economics prize? The nomination process is secret, so there’s no official list of finalists to draw from in handicapping the potential winners. But there are plenty of names that could be on a short list, says David Pendlebury, citation analyst for Thomson Reuters’ science division. “They’re spoiled for choice,” Pendlebury says. “There are more people who are waiting in line to receive the Nobel Prize than there are prizes to give out,” he says.

Every year, Thomson Reuters draws up a list of potential nominees for the economics, medicine, chemistry and physics prizes. They stick to the sciences because their method relies on quantifying citations in scholarly journals to identify the most influential figures in each field. Citations tend to confer agreement or praise, so they are a good way to measure how well-regarded a scholar is by his or her peers, Pendlebury says.

The Nobel Committee doesn’t usually pay much attention to current events, but it may be difficult for them not to be influenced by the events of the past year, Pendlebury says. “It might look a little funny this year” to give an award to a proponent of efficient market theory, Pendlebury says. This could be the year for the prize to go to a behavioral economist whose work acknowledges that people do not always behave rationally.

Last year’s winner was Paul Krugman, a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University and a columnist for The New York Times. He was tapped for his work in analyzing patterns in international trade and concentration of economic activity in urban centers. Former winners are allowed to nominate their peers for the prize, and if Krugman’s recent article, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” is any indication, he’s likely to have made a pick acknowledging the recession or the study of behavioral economics.

This year’s prize will have to take the financial crisis into account to some degree, says Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, an economics professor at Princeton University. But the work recognized by the Nobel committee will have to be “something people can build upon, that’s not just addressing the current crisis, that also [has] a long-lasting impact,” Kiyotaki says. His personal picks include his Princeton colleague Christopher Sims, Thomas Sargent at New York University, and the University of Chicago’s Lars Hansen, all macroeconomists whose work relates to monetary policy. “They’d deserve it individually, but they deserve it collectively as well,” Kiyotaki says.

Of course, the Nobel Committee could surprise the world again by picking an economist who was on nobody’s short list. Here are a few influential scholars who could be in the running for this year’s Prize in Economic Sciences: