The Nobel Prize for Economics this year goes to the researchers David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens.
This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Monday.
Canadian labor economist David Card researches and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.
His empirical studies on the effects of a minimum wage were best known.
In it he compared economically similar regions with and without lower wages and was able to question the assumption that unemployment follows directly from the wage level.
In the mid-1990s, the knowledge gathered led to “Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage”.
They also influenced the political discussions about the introduction of a state minimum wage, for example in Germany under a black-red coalition.
Angrist deals with the training market
Angrist is also doing research on the labor market. The scientist, who has US and Israeli citizenship, holds a chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include the economic analysis of the training market and labor market issues. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stressed the importance of his contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.
Card receives half of the prize money, Angrist and Imbens share the other half. Imbens is a Dutch-American researcher from Stanford University. Like Angrist, he works a lot with econometric analysis, and has also dealt with the further development of the methodology. One of his papers from this year gives an impression of this research: “Using Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks for the Design of Monte Carlo Simulations”.
The Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, which has been awarded since the late 1960s, is the only one that does not go back to the will of the prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).
It was donated by the Swedish Central Bank and is therefore not, strictly speaking, a classic Nobel Prize.
Nevertheless, it will be presented together with the other prizes on the anniversary of Nobel's death, December 10th.
Reinhard Selten is the only German award winner
So far, only one German has been among the Nobel laureates in economics: the Bonn scientist Reinhard Selten received it in 1994 together with John Nash and John Harsanyi for their pioneering contributions to non-cooperative game theory.
According to tradition, scientists from the USA are among the favorites for the award.
Last year it went to the US economists Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson, who were honored for their improvements in auction theory and the invention of new auction formats.