David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens win the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics

Economists David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens have obtained the Nobel Prize in Economics 2021 as announced on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. They receive the award “for having provided new knowledge about the labor market”.

“This year’s awardees, David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens, have provided us with new insights into the job market and have shown what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments,” they highlighted. They have also added that their approach has spread to other fields and that they have revolutionized empirical research.

About the work of David Card, the Academy has indicated his studies on the effects of the minimum wage, immigration and education in the labor market “that defied conventional wisdom,” leading to new analysis and additional insights. “The results showed, among other things, that increasing the minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs”, has collected the Swedish Academy.

They have also highlighted that the work of Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens The mid-1990s solved the methodological problem to interpret the results of natural experiments by demonstrating how they can be extracted precise conclusions about cause and effect from this kind of experiment.

In this way, the three winners happen in the winners of this award to the economists Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson, winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2020.

The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel is endowed with SEK 10 million (988,000 euros) of which half will go to David Card, to whom the Academy has explicitly awarded half of the accolade, while Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens will share the other half.