Nobel Prize in Economics 2021 awarded for contributions to labour economics and to the analysis of causal relationships

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021 goes to David Card "for his empirical contributions to labour economics" and Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens "for their methodological contribution to the analysis of causal relationships". The announcement ceremony was broadcast live on the official website of the Nobel Prize.

This year's laureates are awarded for their research of causality in the social science field. In particular, David Card, University of California, Berkeley, USA since the early 1990s has been researching exactly how the labour market is affected by changes in minimum wages, immigration levels and educational level of the population. In particular, his research results showed that increasing the minimum wage does not necessarily leads to fewer jobs.

Two other laureates, Joshua D. Angristat Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA and Guido W. Imbensat Stanford University, USA, have investigated how causality can be established in natural experiments looking for a relationship between educational levels and income.

In 2020 Stanford economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson won the Nobel in economic science for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats. The laureates studied how auctions work and used their insights to design new auction formats for goods and services that are difficult to sell in a traditional way.

In 2019 the award of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel went to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.

The Nobel Prize for Economics 2018 was awarded in equal parts to William D. Nordhaus for “integrating climate change into long-term macroeconomic analysis” and Paul M. Romer for “integrating technological innovation into long-term macroeconomic analysis”.

The Nobel Prize in Economics (officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), is not technically a Nobel Prize in the same way as other prizes, such as physiology and medicine, physics, chemistry and literature, as well as the Peace Prize, are and was not founded by Alfred Nobel himself, but by the Bank of Sweden in 1968. The sun given is equivalent to the original Nobel Prizes.