Joshua D. Angrist, an MIT labour economist, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. He collaborates on it with two other academics
Joshua Angrist of MIT, David Card of UC Berkeley, and Guido Imbens of Stanford University shared the award for their groundbreaking research on the labour market effects of minimum wage, immigration, and education, as well as for developing the scientific framework that allows conclusions to be drawn from studies that cannot be conducted using traditional methods.
The economics prize, unlike the other Nobel prizes, was not established in Alfred Nobel’s will. It was established in his honour by the Swedish central bank in 1968, with the first winner chosen a year later. Natural experiments employ real-world scenarios to determine global implications, a method that has expanded to other domains and transformed empirical research. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is the final Nobel Prize of the year. The prize pool is worth ten million Swedish crowns ($1.14 million).
Card, 65, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded half of the prize “for his empirical contributions to labour economics,” according to the academy. The remaining half was split between Angrist and Imbens, the latter of whom is 58 and a professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, “for their methodological contributions to the investigation of causal linkages.” “I was just totally startled when I got the phone call; then I was just really pleased when I heard the news,” Imbens said on a conference call with reporters in Stockholm, adding that he was overjoyed to share the prize with two of his close friends. At his wedding, Angrist was the best man.
The Nobel Institute said in a statement that the three laureates “gave us with new insights into the labour market and shown what inferences about cause and effect can be made from natural experiments,” according to NBC.