‘I was hoping to go to sleep’: David Card’s reaction after learning he won Nobel Prize
Guido Imbens and Joshua Angrist, the other two winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics, are good friends, with Angrist having even served as the best man at Imbens wedding.
Following the announcement of the three US-based academics winning the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics, the Nobel committee shared an update on Twitter about David Card – one of the winners, who received the news right after flying home from his grandmother’s memorial. “I was kinda hoping I might go to sleep,” Card told Nobel media’s chief scientific officer, Adam Smith over the phone.
In another update shared by the Nobel committee, Card’s wife, Cynthia Gessele, clicked a photo of him as he spoke to Smith “which he suspected might be a made-up name” right after he heard the news of winning the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Card, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, shared the award with Israeli-American Joshua Angrist and Dutch-American Guido Imbens. While Card won the prize for his “empirical contributions to labour economics,” Angrist and Imbens were awarded the million-dollar prize for their “methodological contributions to the analysis of casual relationships.”
Card’s reaction was similar to Imbens, who said that he was “absolutely stunned to get a telephone call,” according to AFP. Imbens further said that Angrist, the third winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics, was the best man at his wedding.
“Josh Angrist was actually the best man at my wedding so he is a good friend, both professionally and personally, and I’m just thrilled to share the prize with him and David,” Imbens told reporters, according to the AFP report.
Angrist is a professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Imbens is a professor of Applied Econometrics, and Economics at Stanford University.
Knowing the trio’s Nobel-winning work
For his work using natural experiments, Card analysed the “labour market effects of minimum wages, immigration and education,” a press release from the Nobel committee read. His study revealed that a hike in the minimum wages does not necessarily result in fewer jobs.
“We now know that the incomes of people who were born in a country can benefit from new immigration, while people who immigrated at an earlier time risk being negatively affected,” the release added.
Meanwhile, Angrist and Imbens found methodological solutions by demonstrating “how precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments.”
“The framework developed by them has been widely adopted by researchers who work with observational data,” the Nobel committee tweeted.
Expected winners
The win of Card, Angrist and Imbens did not come as a surprise because they were widely speculated for the coveted prize, according to AFP.
Moreover, just like most years in the past, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics winners remain male-dominated. There were only two occasions when women were honoured with the prize, with Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.
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