THE NOBEL PRIZE'S UPS AND DOWNS
By Rick Tetzeli

(FORTUNE Magazine) – When Alfred Nobel established the prize that bears his name, he wanted the award to maintain a consistent value. But after adjusting for Swedish inflation and converting into 1991 dollars, it turns out that until this year, every winner since 1901, when the award was first bestowed, has been stiffed. Of the six laureates shown here, only University of Chicago professor emeritus Ronald Coase, who'll receive nearly $1 million as the recipient of the 1991 prize for economics, gets a purse equivalent to the original award. By 1953, the value of the prize had dropped 70%. Explains Ake Alteus, deputy executive director of Stockholm's Nobel Foundation: Trustees interpreted Nobel's will to stipulate that the 31.5 million kronor -- $196 million in today's dollars -- that he left to fund the prize could be invested only in Swedish government bonds. They modified this in 1953 and moved the capital into a broader range of investments. But by 1987 the award was still worth less than half its original value. So the trustees spun off the foundation's commercial real estate holdings into a public company. The stock offering raised almost $100 million. Since then, the fund has increased its prize money by 176%. In the future, the trustees plan to increase the awards to keep pace with inflation. MIT economist Robert Solow, 67, a winner in 1987, avers that he has no regrets about receiving a prize that earned him $341,981 rather than the $1 million it's worth today. Instead, he bemoans the demands on his time that are brought on by international celebrity. Says he: ''People call you up with all sorts of questions. You become a kind of automatic authority on almost everything, and it takes a certain amount of self-control to remember that you really know only a limited number of things.'' - R.T.