Labor by design: contributions of David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens*

The 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to David Card “for his empirical contributions to labor economics” and to Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”. We survey these contributions of the three laureates, and discuss how their empirical and methodological insights transformed the modern practice of applied microeconomics. By emphasizing research design and formalizing the causal content of different econometric procedures, the laureates shed new light on key questions in labor economics and advanced a robust toolkit for empirical analyses across many fields.