A British-born Jewish American professor has been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, winning half of the $924,000 prize money.

Oliver Hart received the honour alongside Bengt Holmstrom, a professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr Hart, who is a professor of economics at Harvard University, was awarded for his work on contract theory, which studies how contracts allow people to deal with conflicting interests, on Monday.

According to information provided by the academy, the 68-year-old carried out his Nobel-winning work in the 1980s.

Mr Hart has an illustrious family history. He is the son of the late Philip D’Arcy Hart, a leading British medical researcher and pioneer in tuberculosis treatment, and his great-grandfather was Samuel Montagu,an Orthodox Jew who was a member of the House of Commons for 15 years during the 19th century.

Philip D’Arcy Hart died 10 years ago at the ripe old age of 106.

Mr Hart’s wife, Harvard literature professor, Rita Goldberg, wrote the second-generation Holocaust memoir “Motherland: Growing Up With the Holocaust.”

He has published a book (Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure, Oxford University Press, 1995) and innumerable articles in academic journals. He has as also given expert testimony in two legal cases (Black and Decker v. U.S.A. and WFC Holdings Corp. (Wells Fargo) v. U.S.A.).