- Title: Nobel economics prize goes to 'natural experiments' pioneers
- Date: 11th October 2021
- Summary: (SOUNDBITE) (English) NOBEL LAUREATE IN ECONOMIC SCIENCES, GUIDO IMBENS, SAYING: (AUDIO ONLY / PHOTO OF IMBENS ON SCREEN) "I was just absolutely stunned to get a telephone call and then I was just absolutely thrilled to hear the news. In particular hearing that I got to share this with Joshua Angrist and David Card who are both very good friends of mine. Joshua Angrist was actually the best man at Susan's and my wedding so he's a very good friend both professional and personal so I'm just thrilled to share the prize with both him and David."
- Embargoed: 25th October 2021 13:02
- Keywords: David Card Guido Imbens Joshua Angrist Nobel prize Royal Swedish Academy economic sciences natural experiements
- Location: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
- City: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
- Country: Sweden
- Topics: Europe,Science
- Reuters ID: LVA002EYPSRPJ
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text:Economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens won the 2021 Nobel economics prize on Monday (October 11) for pioneering "natural experiments" to show real-world economic impacts in areas from the U.S. fast-food sector to migration from Castro-era Cuba.
Unlike in medicine or other sciences, economists cannot conduct rigidly controlled clinical trials.
Instead, natural experiments use real-life situations to study impacts on the world, an approach that has spread to other social sciences.
Past Nobel Economics prizes have been dominated by U.S. institutions and this was no exception.
Canada-born Card currently works at the University of California, Berkeley; Angrist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Dutch-born Imbens at Stanford University.
One experiment by Card on the impact on the fast-food sector of a minimum wage increase in the U.S. state of New Jersey in the early 1990s prompted a review of the conventional wisdom that such increases should always lead to falls in employment.
The committee also noted that natural experiments were difficult to interpret, but that Angrist and Imbens had in the mid-1990s solved methodological problems to show that precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from them.
"I was just absolutely stunned to get a telephone call, then I was just absolutely thrilled to hear the news," Imbens said on a call with reporters in Stockholm, adding he was thrilled to share the prize with two of his good friends.
Angrist was best man at his wedding.
The prize, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the last of this year's crop of Nobels and sees the winners share a sum of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14 million).
(Production: Philip O'Connor, Ilze Filks, Marissa Davison) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
- Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2021. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
- Usage Terms/Restrictions: Footage contains photographs or artwork. User is responsible for obtaining additional clearances before publishing this clip.
