Nobel Prize / David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens awarded 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics

NEW York: Three US-based economists David Card, Joshua D Angrist and Guido W Imbens have won the 2021 Nobel prize for economics for work on drawing conclusions from unintended experiments, or so-called "natural experiments."

One half the prize was awarded to David Card and the other half jointly to Angrist and Imbens.

David Card is from the University of California at Berkeley; Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Guido Imbens is from Stanford University. Card is a Canadian, Angrist a US citizen while Imbens is of Dutch nationality.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Scienes said the three have ``completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences.''

The Nobel for Economic Sciences differs from the others awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in the sense that it is officially known by a different name.

Officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, the award was instituted by the Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) in 1968, in memory of Alfred Nobel. It has since been awarded by the Academy according to the same principles as those for the Nobel Prizes that have been awarded since 1901.

The Prize is based on a donation received by the Nobel Foundation in 1968 from Sveriges Riksbank on the occasion of the Bank’s 300th anniversary.

Nominations are by invitation only, and names of the nominees cannot be revealed until 50 years later.

The winner is picked by the Academy from among the candidates recommended by the Economic Sciences Prize Committee, after screening nominations and selection of the final candidates.

The first prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen in 1969.

Two Indians have so far won the Economics Nobel- Amartya Sen in 1998 and Abhijit Banerjee in 2019. However Kolkata-born Banerjee had taken US citizenship when he won the prize. The US leads the countries' list in producing the most Economics Nobel laureates.

9 Indians have so far been awarded the Nobel Prize in different categories.

This year's Nobel for Medicine was given jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian; for Physics to Klaus Hasselman and Giorgio Parisi; for Chemistry to Benjamin List and David MacMillan; for Literaure to Abdulrazak Gurnah, and for Peace to Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa.