Nobel Economics Prize awarded to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens

This year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel or the Nobel Economics Prize has been awarded one half to David Card and the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.

According to the Nobel committee's statement, this year’s Laureates were awarded for providing "new insights about the labour market and shown what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments. Their approach has spread to other fields and revolutionised empirical research."

^{(Image: The Nobel Prize/Twitter)}

Half of the 10-million-kronor ($1.1 million, one million euro) prize went to David Card, from Canada, who is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. His work focuses on the effects of minimum wages, immigration, and education on the labour market.

The other half went jointly to Joshua D. Angrist, 61, an American, the Ford Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA and Guido W. Imbens, 58, from the Netherlands, the Applied Econometrics Professor and Professor of Economics, Stanford University, USA, "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships."

They demonstrated how precise cause and effect conclusions can be.

Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson received the award last year for their work on auction theories and the invention of new auction formats.

Interestingly, Nobel Economics Prize is the only Nobel prize not originally included in Nobel's 1895 will. It was established in 1968 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Swedish central bank.

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