David Card, Joshua Ingreste and Guido Empains win the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics | Economie

The winners contributed new ideas about the labor market and demonstrated the results that can be drawn from natural experiments in terms of cause and effect.” This approach eventually spread to other fields and revolutionized field research.

See the contributions of each award-winning study:

• David Card: Effects of minimum wages, immigration and education on the labor market.
• Joshua D. Angreste and Guido and. Empans: Apply methodologies to analyze cause and effect relationships.

According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “Economists have revolutionized empirical research in the social sciences and significantly improved the ability of the research community to answer questions of great importance.”

David Card received the award for his empirical contributions to labor economics. Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens are honored for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.

Card’s studies on issues central to society and the methodological contributions of Angrist and Imbens have shown that natural experiences are a rich source of knowledge. “Their research has greatly improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which have been of great benefit to society,” said Peter Frederickson, chair of the Economic Science Awards Committee.

The researchers will receive a cash prize of 10 million Swedish kronor (US$1.1 million) – half of which will go to David Card and the other half to be split between Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens, because the prize is for the study.

The other Nobel Prize winners this year are:

Born in 1956 in Guelph, Canada, David Card is Professor of Economics at the University of California, USA.

Through natural experiments in the 1990s, Card analyzed the effects of minimum wages, immigration, and education on the labor market. His studies have shown, for example, that raising the minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs.

Another discovery by Card is that school resources are more important for the future in the student labor market than previously thought. and that the income of people born in a country could benefit from new immigration, while those who immigrated previously run the risk of being negatively affected.

Born in 1960 in Columbus, Ohio, USA, Joshua de Angreste is Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. Born in 1963 in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Guido Empains is Professor of Economics at Stanford University, USA.

Angrist and Imbens were jointly rewarded “for their systematic contributions to the analysis of cause-and-effect relationships”.

This methodology has been applied, for example, to understand the impact of an additional year in school on students. According to the study, extending compulsory education in one year to one group of students without another group will not affect everyone in the same way. Some students would have continued studying anyway, and for them, the value of education often did not represent the whole group.

By doing so, the two researchers demonstrated in the mid-1990s how accurate inferences about cause and effect could be drawn from natural experiments.

The oldest winners and only two women

So far, only two women have received the award. In 2019, the prize was awarded to a trio of anti-poverty researchers, Americans Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer and French-American Esther Duflo, The second distinguished woman in discipline and the youngest winner in the history of this award, at the time of 46 years..

The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics was American Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

Economics has been, until now, the Nobel Prize in which it is easy to guess the picture of the future winner: a man with more than 55 years of American citizenship.

Over the past 20 years, three-quarters of them fit this description. The average age of the winners is also over 65, the highest among the six awards.

The Economics Prize, officially called the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, was established in 1968 and first awarded in 1969.

The honor was not part of the original set of five prizes created by the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the creator of dynamite. Other Nobel Prizes (medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace) were awarded for the first time in 1901.

The Nobel Prize in Economics is the latest award to be awarded this year. The Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Peace awards were announced last week.

Although it is the most prestigious award for scholar in economics, the prize has not received the same status as the disciplines chosen by Alfred Nobel in his founding will (medicine, physics, chemistry, peace and literature) – his critics derided him as a “fake Nobel” representing orthodox and liberal economists.

Latest Nobel Prize Winners in Economics

2020: Paul R Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson (USA)For his work on improving theory and inventing new forms of auctions.

2019: Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kramer (EUA)And for their work in the fight against poverty.

2018: William D. Nordhaus e Paul M. Romer (EUA), for his studies on sustainable economics and long-term economic growth.

2017: Richard Thaler (USA), For his research into the effects of psychological and social mechanisms on consumer and investor decisions.

2016: Oliver Hart (UK/US) and Bent Holmstrom (Finland)For his contributions to contract theory.

2015: Angus Deaton (UK/US) For his studies on “Consumption, Poverty, and Welfare.”

2014: Jean Tyrol (France), For his “analysis of market power and regulation”.

2013: Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Schiller (US), for his work in the financial markets.

2012: Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth (USA), for his work on the best way to match supply and demand in the market, with applications in organ donation and education.

2011: Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims (USA), for business that allows us to understand how unexpected events or programmed policies affect macroeconomic indicators.

2010: Peter Diamond and Dale Mortensen (US) and Christopher Pissarides (Cyprus / UK), a trio that has worked to improve the analysis of markets in which supply and demand find it difficult to pair, especially in the labor market.

2009: Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson (US), for their separate business demonstrating that the company and user associations are sometimes more effective than the market.

2008: Paul Krugman (USA), For his work in international trade.

Watch all the videos about the 2021 Nobel Prize: