David Card

University of California, Berkeley

David Card is a Canadian-American labor economist and Class of 1950 Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (one half), with the other half shared between Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens, for his empirical contributions to labor economics and methodological innovations in the use of natural experiments. Card is widely regarded as among the most influential empirical economists of his generation. His most celebrated work—with the late Alan Krueger—used a natural experiment comparing employment in fast-food restaurants on either side of the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border around a New Jersey minimum wage increase to show that raising the minimum wage did not reduce employment, directly contradicting the prevailing standard model prediction. This study transformed the minimum wage debate and demonstrated how natural experiments could generate credible causal estimates in economics. Card has also produced landmark empirical studies on immigration and wages, returns to education, labor market discrimination, and the economics of education more broadly. As Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at Berkeley, he has trained generations of empirical economists. He has received the Mincer Prize, the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.