Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2021: Card, Angrist, and Imbens Win the Award

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to David Card, Joshua D Angrist, and Guido W Imbens.

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was on Monday, 11 October, awarded to David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.

(Photo Courtesy: Twitter/The Nobel Prize)

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was on Monday, 11 October, awarded to David Card, Joshua D Angrist, and Guido W Imbens.

While Card has received the award for "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", Angrist and Imbens have been given the same "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.”

Who Are the Winners?

Born in Guelph, Canada, in the year 1956, David Card, who is affiliated to the University of California, Berkeley, used natural experiments to analyse the effects of minimum wages, education, and immigration on the labour market.

Besides challenging conventional knowledge, Card's studies from the early 1990s have lead to development of new analyses and has brought to light additional insights. In addition to other things, his results showed that increasing minimum wage does not always lead to fewer jobs.

Joshua D Angrist, meanwhile, was born in 1960 in Columbus, Ohio. He is the Ford Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge.

And Guido W Imbens, who was born in September 1963 in Eindhoven, Netherlands, works at the Stanford University.

By the mid 1990s, Joshua Angrist along with Guido Imbens used natural experiments to solve a methodological problem about the effects of an extra year at school on students.

Previous Winners

The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfed Nobel had been awarded to Paul R Milgrom and Robert B Wilson.

The two were awarded "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats," the official Twitter handle for the Nobel Prize said on Monday, 12 October.

In 2019, Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee was among the three people who jointly won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Banerjee was awarded the prize along with his wife and colleague, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."