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Bay Area Professors Named Nobel Laureates in Economics
UC Berkeley's David Card and Stanford's Guido Imbens shared the 2021 economics Nobel for work on labor markets and causal inference from real-world data.
Two Bay Area professors were named Nobel laureates in economics early Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. David Card of UC Berkeley won half of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his empirical contributions to labor economics. Stanford professor Guido W. Imbens shared the other half with Joshua D. Angrist of MIT for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships (ABC7 News).
Card’s best-known work used real-world data, rather than lab experiments, to test long-held assumptions in labor economics — most famously a study on minimum wage increases that challenged the standard prediction that higher minimum wages always cost jobs. Imbens and Angrist’s shared half of the prize recognized statistical methods that let researchers draw causal conclusions from observational data when a controlled experiment isn’t possible.
This marks the second year in a row a UC Berkeley faculty member has won a Nobel Prize. The previous year, Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for CRISPR gene-editing work, and Reinhard Genzel won the Nobel Prize in Physics for research on black holes at the center of the galaxy.
Card discusses some of this research in a talk on immigrant workers and the U.S. economy, available on YouTube.