3 win Nobel Economics Prize for labour insights

STOCKHOLM • Canadian-American David Card, Israeli-American Joshua Angrist and Dutch-American Guido Imbens yesterday won the Nobel Economics Prize for insights into the labour market and "natural experiments".

The researchers were honoured for providing "new insights about the labour market" and showing "what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments", the Nobel committee said in a statement.

Half of the 10 million-kronor (S$1.5 million) prize went to Dr Card, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was born in Canada in 1956, "for his empirical contributions to labour economics". His work has focused on labour market effects of minimum wages, immigration and education.

The other half went jointly to Dr Angrist, 61, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr Imbens, 58, a professor at Stanford, "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships". They demonstrated how precise cause and effect conclusions can be.

The three laureates "have revolutionised empirical work in economics. They have shown that it is indeed possible to answer important questions, even when it is not possible to conduct randomised experiment", Nobel committee member Eva Mork said in announcing the prize.

They were honoured for their work using so-called "natural experiments", in which "chance events or policy changes result in groups of people being treated differently, in a way that resembles clinical trials in medicine".

Last year, the honour went to United States economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for their work on theories of auctions and inventing new auction formats.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE