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Stanford economist Guido W. Imbens today received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in econometrics and statistics.
Guido Imbens, center, with his wife, Susan Athey, and their three children. Imbens received the 2021 Memorial Nobel Prize in Economics. (Image credit: Bjorn Carey)
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prizes, jointly awarded half of the 10 million Swedish Kronor (approximately US $ 1 million) prize, officially known as the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics. 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 went to David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, for “his empirical contributions to labor economics.”
Imbens, 58, is a professor of applied econometrics and professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business and a senior researcher at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).
Throughout his career, Imbens has carried out influential work to help overcome the limitations of the real experiences of social scientists, dramatically improving the ability of researchers to evaluate the effects of interventions from field and experimental data. His work makes it possible to analyze complex research questions such as the effectiveness of a new drug on a patient or the impacts of new regulations on economic activity.
“I was absolutely amazed to receive a phone call,” Imbens said over the phone with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in a question-and-answer session they held with the media immediately after the announcement. “I was absolutely delighted to hear the news, especially to hear that I was able to share this with Josh Angrist and David Card, both of whom are very good friends of mine.”
Imbens developed methods for drawing causal inferences in observational studies, using pairing, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity models.
Imbens, together with Angrist, an economist at MIT, launched a model called the Local Average Processing Effect (LATE), which they introduced in a 1994 study. Econometrics document entitled “Identification and estimation of the average local effects of the treatment”. The concept helps researchers better assess the causal effects of interventions in observational studies.
The model had a significant impact on research practices in econometrics and other fields of statistics, with some of Imbens’ papers ranked among the most cited economic research of the 1990s. Imbens summarized some of his work in a 2015 book he co-wrote with Donald B. Rubin, titled Causal inference for statistics, social sciences and biomedical.
Imbens also works with governments and political institutions on the design and evaluation of economic policy interventions in areas such as education and labor.
Originally from the Netherlands, Imbens attended Erasmus University Rotterdam and Hull University in England.
He received his Masters and PhD in Economics from Brown University in 1991. He was an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at Harvard between 1990 and 1997, and taught there again from 2006 to 2012, after which he joined Stanford faculty. University. He was a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1997 to 2001 and at the University of California at Berkeley from 2002 to 2006. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Gallen.
Imbens is a member of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities; the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences; and the American Statistical Association. He is married to Stanford economist Susan Athey, who became the first woman to win the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal in 2007.
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