Economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens won today the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics. His works are about pioneering "natural experiments" to show real-world economic impact in areas from the US fast-food sector to Castro-era migration from Cuba.
David Card won "for his empirical contributions to labor economics. Angrist and Imbens, meanwhile, were awarded "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.
Unlike medicine or other sciences, economists cannot conduct rigidly controlled clinical trials. Instead, natural experiments use everyday situations to study impacts on the world, an approach that has spread to other social sciences.
"His research has substantially improved our ability to answer major moral questions. This is being of great benefit to society," said Peter Fredriksson, chairman of the Economic Science Prize Committee.
All three economists are connected to North American universities, but only Joshua Angrist was born in the USA. David Card is from Canada and Guido Imbens was born in the Netherlands. David Card is a researcher at Berkeley University in the USA. Joshua Angrist is a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens is at Stanford University.
The prestigious prizes for works in science, literature, and peace were created and funded by the dynamite inventor and successful businessman, the Swede Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded since 1901. The economics prize was created through a donation from Sweden's central bank and first awarded in 1969.
Although the economics prize has tended to live in the shadow of the often already famous winners of the peace and literature prizes, the laureates over the years include several influential economists, such as the Austrian-British Friedrich August von Hayek and the American Milton Friedman.