London: Three US academicians from prestigious universities were on Monday conferred the Nobel Prize for Economics for their contribution in adopting the techniques of clinical trials to understand the impact of cause and effect in the economic phenomenon, especially the labour market and its dynamics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021, or the Economics Nobel, goes to Economics Professors David Card, "for his empirical contributions to labour economics" and Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".
While Card, 65, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, will get half of the 10 mn Swedish kronor ($1.14 mn) prize amount, the other half will be shared between Angrist, 61, the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Imbens, 58, the Applied Econometrics Professor and Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
According to the Society, the cause and effect relationship underlines key questions in social sciences, particularly economics, say the effect on education on future earning capacity. However, finding answers is tricky due to lack of comparison - in this case, the effect of not continuing education, but the three laureates "have shown that it is possible to answer these and similar questions using natural experiments".