Nobel Prize for David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens

I was excited to hear that the 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (aka Nobel Prize in Economics) was announced as being awarded to David Card (University of California, Berkeley), Joshua Angrist (MIT), and Guido Imbens (Stanford University). David Card's half of the award was "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", while Angrist and Imbens shared the other half "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships."

This was a well-deserved prize, as all three have made outstanding contributions to empirical microeconomics, and in particular they laid the foundations for what has been termed the 'credibility revolution' in economics. The revolution was the turn towards a greater focus on empirical work that began from the 1990s, and particularly involved the adoption of new econometric methods that now encompass instrumental variables regression, difference-in-differences, and regression discontinuity designs, among others. Regular readers of this blog will certainly have come across those terms before, as they are now the de facto standard for much of the empirical work in applied microeconomics.

The focus on applications is perhaps the most important aspect of their work. Rather than making contributions purely to econometric theory, all three have written key papers that apply those techniques to important real-world policy problems. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has written an excellent (albeit brief) summary of their contributions, as has The Economist. You can read the Nobel Committee's summary of their work here.

The work of all three awardees has appeared at various times on this blog, including a reference to David Card's work (with Alan Krueger) on the minimum wage just a few days ago (albeit noting that the literature as a whole probably doesn't support the Card and Krueger results now), Card's work (with co-authors) on the gender gap at top economics journals, reviews of Joshua Angrist's popular econometrics books (with  Jorn-Steffen Pischke) Mostly Harmless Econometrics (review here) and Mastering 'Metrics (review here), and Guido Imbens on statistical significance back in August.

One sad aspect of this award is that Alan Krueger, who might surely have shared the award given his early work with both David Card and Joshua Angrist, passed away in 2019. Imbens may well have been the beneficiary, but nevertheless he, along with Card and Angrist, is very deserving of recognition. 

Anyway, I'm quite overexcited by this award - I appear to have run out of superlatives to use in this post!