David Card, Guido W. Imbens & Joshua D. Angrist win Nobel in Economics

Economists David Card, Joshua D. Angrist, and Guido W. Imbens bagged the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics. The news was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday, 11th October 2021. Sharing the news on its social media handle, the Nobel Prize organization mentioned that one half of the award was given to David Card “for his empirical contributions to labour economics and the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.”

All three economists - Card, Angrist, and Imbens – live in the United States of America. David Card was born in Canada works at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Joshua D. Angrist born in the United States is currently at M.I.T., and Guido W. Imbens, who was born in the Netherlands, is at Stanford. 

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Speaking of their victory Peter Fredriksson, chairman of the prize committee reportedly said, “Uncovering causal relationships is a major challenge. Sometimes, nature, or policy changes, provide situations that resemble randomized experiments. This year’s laureates have shown that such natural experiments help answer important questions for society.”

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Speaking of experiments, Mr. Card has studied unintended experiments to analyze larger economic questions. For instance, if raising the minimum wages lead to the loss of jobs among people. On the other hand, Angrist and Imbens have worked towards developing research tools to help economists analyze real-life situations to understand big theories. For instance, the effect of additional education on earnings. 

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In this regard, the organization wrote, “This year’s laureates – Card, Angrist, and Imbens – have provided us with new insights about the labour market and shown what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments. Their approach has spread to other fields and revolutionised empirical research.”

The Nobel prize in Economics was not originally established at the will of Alfred Nobel. It was instead done by the Swedish central bank in his memory in 1968. The very first winner in this category was announced a year later, and it’s the last Nobel prize to be announced each year. 

Many economists reflected that much of the research that featured on the prize announcement was co-written by Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton University economist and former White House adviser who passed away in 2019. Despite this unfortunate fact, economists around the globe celebrated the win, while crediting the winners for their respective works to bring about a change in the labour market.

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