Joshua Angrist
Israeli American economist and Nobel laureate in causal analysis.
Joshua David Angrist is an Israeli American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Guido Imbens for methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships. Angrist is known for using quasi-experimental research designs to study public policies and economic changes.
Quick Facts
- Born
- 18 September 1960
- Birthplace
- Columbus, Ohio, U.S.
- Institution
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Field
- Econometrics, labor economics
- Doctoral advisor
- Orley Ashenfelter
- Doctoral students
- Esther Duflo
- Jonah B. Gelbach
- Melissa Kearney
- Jeffrey R. Kling
- Academic advisors
- David Card; Whitney Newey
- Contributions
- Local average treatment effect
Facts from the source article.
Biography
Angrist was born to a Jewish family in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Pittsburgh, graduating from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1977. He earned a B.A. in economics from Oberlin College in 1982, then lived in Israel from 1982 to 1985, serving as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defence Forces. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1987 and 1989; his dissertation, supervised by Orley Ashenfelter, analyzed the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery. After his Ph.D., Angrist was an assistant professor at Harvard University until 1991, then a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University. Promoted to associate professor there, he joined MIT's Economics Department as associate professor in 1996 and became full professor in 1998. Since 2008 he has been MIT's Ford Professor of Economics. He has held editorial roles at several economics journals and is affiliated with multiple professional organizations. Angrist holds dual US–Israeli citizenship and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Research
Angrist's research covers the economics of education and school reform, social programs, labor markets, immigration, labor regulation, and econometric methods for policy evaluation. He ranks among the top 50 economists on IDEAS/RePEc and frequently co-authors with Guido Imbens, Alan B. Krueger, Victor Lavy, Parag Pathak, and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. With Pischke he published Mostly Harmless Econometrics in 2008 and Mastering 'Metrics' in 2014. Much of his work focuses on returns to schooling. With Krueger he used children's season of birth and compulsory schooling laws to estimate returns to education, finding results close to OLS estimates and that compulsory attendance keeps about 10% of students in school. Another study with Krueger exploited the Vietnam-era draft lottery as an instrumental variable, but later split-sample IV research did not support those estimates. With Daron Acemoglu he used variation in U.S. compulsory schooling laws to estimate human-capital externalities, finding them about 1% and not statistically significant. He also studied declining returns to schooling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1980s, and with Lavy examined returns in Morocco after a language-of-instruction change.
Honors and awards
Angrist is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006 and received an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of St. Gallen in 2007. In 2011 he was awarded the John von Neumann Award by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies in Budapest. Along with Guido Imbens, Angrist won the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics; the two shared half the prize money, with David Card receiving the other half. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that Angrist and Imbens demonstrated how precise causal conclusions can be drawn from natural experiments, solving a methodological problem regarding the interpretation of data from such experiments.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was Joshua Angrist born?
Joshua Angrist was born on 18 September 1960 in Columbus, Ohio, U.S.
Where did Joshua Angrist study?
Joshua Angrist studied at Oberlin College (BA) and Princeton University (MA, PhD).
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