The Nobel season came to a close on Monday with the awarding of the prize for economic sciences.
David Card, of the University of California, Berkeley, won half of the award “for his empirical contributions to labour economics.” The other half went jointly to Joshua Angrist, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Guido Imbens, of Stanford University, “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”
“This year’s Laureates … have provided us with new insights about the labour market and shown what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments,” the Nobel committee said in a news release. “Their approach has spread to other fields and revolutionised empirical research.”
The prestigious prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were created and funded in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and wealthy businessman Alfred nobel.
They have been awarded since 1901, though the economics prize — created through a donation from Sweden’s central bank on its 300th anniversary — is a later addition that was first handed out in 1969.
While the economics award has tended to live in the shadow of the often already famous winners of the prizes for peace and literature, laureates over the years include a number of hugely influential economists, such as the Austrian-British Friedrich August von Hayek and American Milton Friedman.
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