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Canadian David Card and Americans Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens were recognized for being the first to use “natural experiments”, a form of investigation of everyday situations that serves to understand the causal effects of economic policy and that revolutionized the field of empirical methodology.
The announcements of the Nobel Prizes 2021 were closed this Monday, October 10 after the award was defined in the area of Economics, the last of the distinctions that began last Monday with the one corresponding to Medicine. Later those of Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Peace were announced.
The award winners in the discipline of exact sciences were Canadian David Card and Americans Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens, who were recognized as pioneers in the use of “natural experiments”, a methodology to understand causal effects. of economic policy.
This form of analysis is used in real-life situations to decipher the consequences in the world, a novel approach that spread to other fields of research and revolutionized the empirical method.
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.#NobelPrize
– The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 11, 2021
“Natural experiments are everywhere,” said Eva Mörk, a member of the Alfred Nobel Prize Committee in Economic Sciences. The jury stated that this methodology brought “new ideas about the labor market and showed what conclusions can be drawn from natural experiments in terms of causes and consequences”
Card conducted an experiment on raising the minimum wage in New Jersey in the early 1990s and got researchers to reshape their view that increases lead to declines in employment.
Officially, Card took half of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences for “his empirical contributions to labor economics,” the Academy said. While Angrist and Imbens shared the other half “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.”
In one example David Card – awarded the 2021 prize in economic sciences – and Alan Krueger (now deceased) used a natural experiment to investigate how increased minimum wages affect employment.#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/k9lk1684AI
– The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 11, 2021
Once again, the prestigious institutions of the United States have monopolized an award that has been presented since 1969. Card works at the University of California, Angrist works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the American-Dutch Imbens at Stanford.
About the announcement, Imbens told reporters in Stockholm that he was “absolutely stunned to receive a phone call” and then was moved to hear the news. Finally, he added that he was “excited” to share the award with two friends.
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