Reflections on the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize Awarded to 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 labour economics”, and to Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”. Lennart B. Ackermans reflects on Card, Angrist, and Imben's work. Ackermans argues, first, that advances in causal methodology from Angrist and Imbens have helped solve the credibility crisis in econometrics and revealed shortcomings in past and present graduate textbooks in econometrics. Second, for the field to develop further, economists must resolve the current disputes surrounding causal frameworks. The article compares the merits of the three frameworks for causal modelling proposed by, respectively, Donald Rubin, Judea Pearl, and James Heckman.