Joshua Angrist

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Joshua Angrist is an American-Israeli economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with David Card (half) and Guido Imbens for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships. Angrist is a principal architect of the credibility revolution in empirical economics—the transformation of applied economics through rigorous identification of causal effects using natural experiments and quasi-experimental methods. His foundational work on instrumental variables (with Guido Imbens) developed the concept of the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE), clarifying precisely what population-average causal effect is identified when using an instrument with heterogeneous treatment effects—a ubiquitous situation in economic research. His collaboration with Alan Krueger used Vietnam War draft lottery status as an instrument to identify the causal effect of military service and schooling on earnings, demonstrating that each additional year of schooling raises earnings by roughly 7-10%. Angrist has produced major empirical studies on class size, school choice and charter schools, the effects of immigration on native workers, and labor market consequences of disability. With Jorn-Steffen Pischke, he co-authored Mostly Harmless Econometrics, which has become the standard textbook for applied econometric methods and is widely used in economics PhD programs worldwide. He has received the Joshua Angrist Applied Econometrics Prize (named in his honor) and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.