Israeli American Professor Joshua Angrist is among three people who have won the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, it was announced Monday.
Angrist, who taught in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before moving to the United States, has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – an Ivy League institution also attended by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, currently the Opposition Leader in the Knesset – since 1996. He also taught at Harvard University.
Angrist, an expert on labor and the economics of education who has also done work in the field of econometrics, shared half the prize with Stanford University’s Guido Imbens; the other half was awarded to David Card at the University of California at Berkeley.
“Card’s studies of core questions for society and Angrist and Imbens’ methodological contributions have shown that natural experiments are a rich source of knowledge,” said Economic Sciences Committee chairman Peter Fredriksson. “Their research has substantially improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which has been of great benefit for society,” he said.
The three received their award for the conclusions they have drawn from “natural experiments,” also known as unintended experiments.
The three laureates have “completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
The Nobel Economics Prize is the last to be announced each year.