Best of #econtwitter - Nobel 2021 special edition
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Best of #econtwitter - Nobel 2021 special edition
Throwback Thursday: 2020 Nobel special edition
The prize
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded with one half to David Card and the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.
#NobelPrize
@JustinWolfers I wonder if the inability to let Krueger share in this prize posthumously might not be why they assigned shares...if it had been all 4, it would have been equally shared. 50/50 could be a nod to his absence, since we all know it's really "Card & Krueger" + "Angrist & Imbens"
(^though)
Threads
Short version of the prize: We used to dig into the data, say "correlation ain't causation," quickly forget we said that, and make a bunch of causal-ish statements based on data that really couldn't support such claims.
It’s been some time since my last tweet, but a timely Nobel Prize came as a call for a thread! I’ve just defended my PhD thesis "Experiments in the Armchair: A History of Microeconometrics and Program Evaluation at Princeton". I follow Ashenfelter and his mentees up close in it!
^recommended, related paper
Afraid I am working on a new project in Dakar on sabbatical and am under the weather, so no full AFT post this year about the Nobel. But, a few bagatelles about an obvious prize, and also one that is widely misunderstood (but not by the winners, that's for sure!)
On the occasion of today's #Economics @NobelPrize awarded for methodologies to uncover causality in non-experimental situations, I want to share a thought with other adjacent fields of academia that rely on empirical evidence: public health, medicine, other social sciences.
LATE is an advance that, even when stated clearly, is not "obvious" even after you see it. It makes you think carefully about exactly what a regression identifies (a weighted average of heterogeneous effects) and the implicit assumptions pervading empirical analysis (10/n)
The “credibility revolution”, started in labor and education. Today, the methods and practice of causal analysis that Card, Angrist and Imbens pioneered have penetrated all fields of economics.
Some beautiful examples of exploiting natural experiments from my home turf, macro:
David Card's contribution to the minimum wage literature is big, but it's not his only contribution to economics. One of his more recent contribution is on wage inequality and the role played by firms.
A thread [1/12] 👇
#NobelPrizeEconomics #EconTwitter
MR
A Nobel Prize for the Credibility Revolution--David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens. My writeup at Marginal Revolution
Nobel Prize meta
Imagine you give a prize for achievement, and you also have some values you care about promoting.
It seems like it wouldn't be optimal for you to give the prize based exclusively on achievement all the time. The prize earns reputation with the strongest winners,
1/
I think they should stop giving Nobel prizes to people and instead give them to papers. I don’t want to celebrate someone’s career, I want celebrate the event of discovering an unknown that was waiting to be known.
This year's prize reaffirms a trend we've seen for years: If you want to win the Prize, you've got to win the next generation of graduate students. Teach them tools that they can use to push back the frontier. Each of these guys has trained a veritable army of graduate students.
Fluff
@NobelPrize Remembering when Josh Angrist moonlighted as an Uber driver to get info for a paper (he got low ratings b/c passengers said he asked them too many questions).
Rando drunk Boston ppl driven around by a Nobel laureate studying incentives and human behavior is <kiss-fingers>
@Austan_Goolsbee @NobelPrize He was also objectively bad. Look at Figure 5A of our paper. The random detour on the waterfront was, I am told, not part of the route. Unclear Josh knows that's the trip receipt I chose to put in....
Good thing Josh Angrist won that Nobel Prize today and won't have to rely on his backup career of Uber driver, since apparently, it was not his comparative (or absolute tbh looking at this map😂) advantage.
Sydnee Caldwell @SydneeCaldwell
Shachar Kariv, the Berkeley economics department chair, just reminded me that David is no longer allowed to win the department’s best advisor award, to give others a chance.
