Nobel Prize 2021: David Card, Joshua D Angrist, Guido W Imbens win Economics award

NEW DELHI: David Card, Joshua D Angrist, and Guido W Imbens have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics 2021 “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences declared the winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in the memory of Alfred Nobel 2021.

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“The 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded with one half to David Card and the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.#NobelPrize,” the Nobel Prize official account said in a social media post.

BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded with one half to David Card and the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/nkMjWai4Gn

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 11, 2021

“2021 economic sciences laureates Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens showed what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments. The framework developed by them has been widely adopted by researchers who work with observational data,” the official page added.

“This year’s Laureates – David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido 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,” an official statement from the Nobel Prize website said.

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Many of the big questions in the social sciences deal with cause and effect. How does immigration affect pay and employment levels? How does a longer education affect someone’s future income? These questions are difficult to answer because we have nothing to use as a comparison, the official statement read.

While David Card used natural experiments to analyse the labour market effects of minimum wages, immigration and education, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens solved methodological problems, demonstrating how precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments, the official statement further said.