Guido Wilhelmus Imbens (born 3 September 1963) is a Dutch-American economist whose research concerns econometrics and statistics.

[1] In 2021, Imbens was awarded half of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Joshua Angrist "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.

"[2][3] Their work focused on natural experiments, which can offer empirical data in contexts where controlled experimentation may be expensive, time-consuming, or unethical.

[23] Working with fellow economists including Joshua Angrist and Alan Krueger, Imbens focused on developing methodologies and frameworks that help economists use a kind of real-life situations known as natural experiments to test hypotheses about causal relationships, such as the impact of additional years of school education on earnings.

[18] In one of his earliest collaborations with Angrist, Imbens introduced a concept called Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) to draw causal inference from observational data.

In a 1994 Econometrica paper titled "Identification and Estimation of Local Average Treatment Effects", the pair employed the idea of natural experiments, where one studies the effects of key changes by using chance and randomization that naturally occur in the real world, instead of controlled conditions, which can be expensive, time-consuming, or even unethical.

[18][27] Some of Imbens' work was summarized in a 2015 book co-written with American statistician Donald B. Rubin, Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences.

[28][29] Imbens received the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with fellow economists David Card and Joshua Angrist for their contributions toward methodologies for the analysis of causal relationships.

[30] In its press release, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that they "have provided us with new insights about the labour market and shown what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments.