Nobel Prize in Economics Awarded to 3 US-based Specialists

The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded on Monday to three US-based specialists in experimental economics, namely Canadian-born David Card, American-Israeli Joshua Angrist and Dutch-born Guido Imbens. David Card, of the University of California, was awarded one half of the prize “for his empirical contributions to labor economics.” This embodies research on how minimum wage, immigration and education affect the labor market. As for the other half, it was shared by Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens from Stanford University “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships;” a framework for studying issues that cannot rely on traditional scientific methods. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three have “completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences.” Unlike the other Nobel prizes, the economics award was not established in the will of Alfred Nobel but by the Swedish central bank in his memory in 1968, with the first winner selected a year later.