This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded to David Card, for his contribution to labor economics, and to Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens, for their contributions to the analysis of causal relationships. The Nobel Committee in Stockholm has just announced this.
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In the early 1990s, it was traditionally believed that a higher minimum wage led to higher unemployment. David Card (1956, University of California), and the late Alan Krueger, empirically showed that a higher minimum wage does not have a strong effect on employment. He will also receive the award for his contributions on the effects of immigration on the labor market.
The American Joshua Angrist (1960, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the Dutchman Guido Imbens (1963, Stanford University) receive the prize for their econometric contributions to discovering causal relationships.
The three professors made it possible to make decisions in disciplines where experiments cannot be performed, and where natural experiments must be continued. This is the case, for example, when one US state raises the minimum wage and another does not.
The prize money of the Nobel Prize is 10 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to almost 988,800 euros. Last year the prize was awarded to the Americans Robert Wilson and Paul Milgrom, who developed the auction theory.
The Nobel Prize in economics traditionally closes the Nobel Prize week. It is officially not a Nobel Prize, but the Swedish Reichsbank prize for economics.
