Brown University Graduate Wins Nobel Prize in Economics
Monday, October 11, 2021
Guido Imbens, a Stanford University economist who earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1991, is one of three recipients of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday, October 11.
Imbens is the latest Brown-affiliated scholar to receive a Nobel Prize, with two professors on the Brown faculty at the time of their awards having received the honor.
In 2016, Professor of Physics J. Michael Kosterlitz won the Nobel Prize in physics "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.”
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTHe joined Leon Cooper, a professor of physics who won the prize in 1972 for developing a theory of superconductivity, the ability of some materials to conduct electricity with zero resistance.
About Imbens
Brown University announced the news on Monday.
Imbens and colleague Joshua Angrist, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were awarded the prize in recognition of their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships, according to the academy. The pair split the prize with David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, whose empirical contributions to labor economics helped launch a new era of natural experiments across the social sciences.
As a Nobel laureate, Imbens will receive a gold medal, a diploma and $286,250 — a quarter of the $1,145,000 economics prize.
Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Royal Swedish Academy’s economic sciences committee and a professor of economics at Uppsala University, said the three scholars’ work has revealed ways in which natural experiments — that is, experiments that divide people into treatment and control groups naturally, without any scientific intervention — can answer important questions for society.
“Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens have clarified exactly what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments,” Fredriksson said. “Their framework for estimation, validation and interpretation has been widely adopted in applied work. The combined contributions of the laureates have completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences, and therefore our ability to answer causal questions of great importance to us all has improved tremendously.”
In 1996, Imbens and Angrist outlined a highly influential framework for causal inference in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Their framework has been cited in scientific studies more than 6,000 times, and it has enabled hundreds of experiments exploring causal relationships — such as relationships between income and health, immigration policy and the labor market, and lockdowns and the spread of infection.
Imbens on the Record
Imbens, who spoke on the phone with academy leaders and reporters during the presentation, said he received a phone call with the exciting news while still asleep in California.
“It was a little after 2 in the morning here,” he said. “The whole house was asleep; we’d had a busy weekend. I was just absolutely stunned to get a telephone call, and then I was absolutely thrilled to hear the news.”
The economist said he was particularly excited to share the award with Angrist and Card, both “good friends of mine.” Angrist, he said, had been the best man at his wedding.
Asked if he had advice for aspiring economists, Imbens encouraged young people to consider the profession for its flexibility and potential societal impact.
“Economics is a really interesting discipline these days, where you can look at so many questions and... in so many different ways,” he said. “And so for young people thinking about a career in economics, I think that’s a great choice. Economics tends to be a good discipline for allowing people to pursue questions that are quite broad... areas where economists do useful work, both in policy and in many cases in private industry.”
Imbens, now a professor of economics and applied econometrics at Stanford, received his Ph.D. from Brown in 1991. After Brown, Imbens went on to teach at Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles, and U.C. Berkeley before moving to Stanford. He was born in Eindhoven in the Netherlands and received a bachelor’s degree from Erasmus University Rotterdam.
In 2017, Brown awarded Imbens the Horace Mann Medal — an annual honor to a Brown Graduate School graduate who has made important contributions in their field — in recognition of his important contributions to the field of economics.
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