STOCKHOLM — French economist Jean Tirole won the Nobel Prize for economics today for research on market power and regulation.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Tirole for clarifying “how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms.”

Tirole, 61, works at the Toulouse School of Economics in France and has a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“From the mid-1980s and onwards, Jean Tirole has breathed new life into research on such market failures,” the academy said.

“In a series of articles and books, Jean Tirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking,” the academy said.