Economist Guido Imbens Awarded Nobel in Economic Sciences
Guido Imbens | Photo by Kelsey Doyle
Guido W. Imbens shared the 2021 award for his contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.
During his first year teaching and living at Harvard University, Guido Imbens spent his Saturday mornings with his colleague Joshua Angrist at the university housing laundromat, where the pair would discuss work and ponder questions about the world. Memories of those decades-ago conversations flooded back to Imbens upon learning that both he and Angrist had been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for work they conducted together.
“We were talking about ideas and thinking about open questions,” Imbens said of those spin-cycle sessions, noting, “It’s essentially where we figured out the main ideas that are the basis for this prize.”
Imbens is the applied econometrics professor and professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also a professor of economics at the School of Humanities and Sciences and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which grants the Nobel prizes, jointly awarded one-half of the prize, officially known as the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” to Imbens and Angrist for “their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.” The other half of the prize was awarded to David Card at the University of California, Berkeley, for “his empirical contributions to labour economics.”
“Professor Imbens has played a central role in shaping how researchers understand and analyze causal relationships,” said then Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. “His insights and framework, developed alongside his close colleague and fellow laureate Joshua Angrist, have helped researchers in the field of economics and beyond use natural experiments to answer important questions for society and our world. All of us at Stanford take great pride in his accomplishments.”
Throughout his career, Imbens has conducted influential work to help address the limitations of real-world experiments of social scientists, greatly improving researchers’ ability to assess the effects of interventions from both field and experimental data. His work is used to analyze complicated research questions such as the effectiveness of a new drug on a patient or the impacts of new regulation on economic activity.
“I was absolutely stunned to get a telephone call,” said Imbens immediately following the announcement.
Read the full, original story about how Professor Imbens went from pondering ideas at the laundromat to expanding the field of econometrics — and winning the Nobel Prize.
