MeJudice · CC BY 3.0

Angrist shares the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Guido Imbens for developing rigorous ways to draw cause-and-effect conclusions from real-world data that was never collected in a controlled experiment. His instrumental-variables techniques, applied to questions like the effect of schooling on earnings or class size on learning, gave economists tools to study policy questions once thought impossible to answer cleanly outside a lab. He teaches at MIT and co-founded Blueprint Labs, which researches the link between education and income inequality.