"[2][3][4][5] The Nobel Committee stated their reason behind the decision, saying: "This year's Laureates – David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens – have shown that natural experiments can be used to answer central questions for society, such as how minimum wages and immigration affect the labour market.

Angrist and Imbens' contributions were on the local average treatment effect and natural experiments to estimate causal links.

[7] Card earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Queen's University in 1978 and his Ph.D. degree in economics in 1983 from Princeton University, after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Indexation in long term labor contracts", under the supervision of Orley Ashenfelter.

[10] He was the recipient of the 1995 John Bates Clark Medal and the 2014 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management with Richard Blundell "for their contributions to empirical microeconomics."

Angrist was born to a Jewish family in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1977.

His doctoral dissertation, Econometric Analysis of the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery, was supervised by Orley Ashenfelter[14] and later published in parts in the American Economic Review.

[17] He was the recipient of the 2011 John von Neumann Award given annually by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies in Budapest.