2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 11 October 2021.

The citation

Half of the prize goes to David Card "for his empirical contributions to labour economics". Half of the prize goes jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".

The laureates

David Card was born in 1956 in Guelph, Canada, and is affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley. Joshua D. Angrist was born in 1960 in Columbus, the United States, and is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. Guido W. Imbens was born in 1963 in Geldrop, the Netherlands, and is affiliated with Stanford University, Stanford.

Why it matters

The three economists showed how to draw conclusions about cause and effect from real-world events, known as natural experiments. Card used the method to study the minimum wage.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895. Strictly, this award is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It was established by the Swedish central bank in 1968, but is presented alongside the Nobel Prizes.