The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences goes half to 65-year-old Canadian David Card and half, jointly, to 61-year-old American Joshua D. Angrist and 58-year-old Dutch Guido W. Imben. Card was awarded for the empirical contribution to the labor market, Angrist and Imben for the methodological contribution to the analysis of causal relationships. “Card’s studies are on fundamental issues for society, the methodological contributions of Angrist and Imbens have shown that field experiments are a rich source of knowledge: an approach that has spread to other fields and revolutionized research. empirical »writes the Stockholm Academy of Sciences, motivating the award of the prestigious award.
David Card is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and Director of the Occupational Studies Program at NBER. Her research focuses on immigration, wages, education and gender and ethnicity differences in the labor market. Much of Card’s work focuses on confronting the United States and Canada in various situations. In his experiments, explains the Academy, «Card analyzed the effects of minimum wages, immigration and education on the labor market, challenging common thinking, leading to new analyzes and further insights. The results showed, among other things, that increasing the minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs. We now know that the incomes of people born in a country can benefit from a new immigration, while those who previously immigrated are likely to be negatively affected ”. Card’s work, the note continues, highlighted how the resources attributed to the school system “are much more important for the future success of students in the labor market than previously thought”.
His fame began in the early 1990s, when Card discovered, contrary to widely accepted beliefs among economists, that the increase in the minimum wage in New Jersey did not lead to a reduction in the jobs of fast food companies in the state. On immigration, Card’s research has shown that the economic impact of new immigrants is minimal. Card was co-editor of Econometrica from 1991 to 1995 and co-editor of the American Economic Review from 2002 to 2005. And it is not the first distinguished award he has received: in 1995 he received the John Bates Clark Prize of the American Economic Association, which is awarded every two years to the economist under 40 whose work is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field and in 2015 received the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award for his contributions to evidence-based economic policy .
Guido W. Imbens is a Dutch-American economist, professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business since 2012. After earning his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1991, he has taught at Harvard University, UCLA and UC Berkeley. Imbens’ main field of interest is econometrics. His research focuses on developing methods for drawing causal inferences in observational studies, using correspondence models, instrumental variables and regression discontinuities.
Joshua D. Angrist instead, he is of Israeli-American origins and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is among the top economists in the world for labor economics, urban economics, and education economics. His researches focus on economics of education and school reform, social programs and the labor market, the effects of immigration, labor market regulation and institutions, and econometric methods for program and policy evaluation. Born in Columbus, Ohio and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Angrist attended Oberlin College, where he earned his BA in Economics in 1982. He lived in Israel from 1982 to 1985.
The two scholars are awarded the distinction for «the methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships, which have shown that natural experiments are a rich source of knowledge. Their research has substantially improved our ability to answer crucial questions, ”said Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Economic Sciences Award Committee. The data from the field experiments are in fact “difficult to interpret,” writes the Swedish Academy. “In the mid-1990s, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens solved this methodological problem, demonstrating how precise conclusions on cause and effect can be drawn from field studies.”