Joshua David Angrist (born September 18, 1960)[1] is an Israeli–American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[2] Angrist, together with Guido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021 "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".
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[10] and later published in parts in the American Economic Review.
[17] He is a frequent co-author of Guido Imbens, Alan B. Krueger, Victor Lavy, Parag Pathak and Jörn-Steffen Pischke.
[21] Another early attempt at using IV to estimate returns to schooling by Angrist and Krueger was to exploit the Vietnam-era draft lottery.
[23] Angrist further used variation in U.S. compulsory schooling laws in research with Daron Acemoglu in order to estimate human-capital externalities, which they found to be about 1% and not statistically significant.
[30] Similarly, in a study by Angrist, Philip Oreopoulos and Daniel Lang comparing the impact of academic support services, financial incentives and a combination of both on Canadian college first-year students, the combined treatment raised the grades of women throughout their first and second years but had no impact on men.
[32][33] Another subject of Angrist's research are peer effects in education,[34] which he has e.g. explored with Kevin Lang in the context of METCO's school integrations or with Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak in Boston's and New York City's over-subscribed exam schools, though the effects that they find are brief and modest in both cases.
[38] Since the late 2000s, Angrist has conducted extensive research on charter schools in the U.S. with Pathak, Abdulkadiroglu, Susan Dynarski, Thomas Kane, and Christopher Walters.
[44] In further work exploiting the idiosyncrasies of U.S. military recruitment, Angrist studies the labor market impact of voluntary military service in the 1980s, estimating that voluntary soldiers serving in the 1980s earned considerably more than comparable civilians while serving and experienced comparatively higher employment rates thereafter, even though it raised their long-run civilian earnings at best modestly and - for whites - reduced them.
[47] In another study related to the U.S. military, Angrist and John H. Johnson IV use the Gulf War to estimate the effects of work-related separations on military families, showing large differences between the impact of male and female soldiers' deployment on divorce rates and spousal labor supply.
[63] Finally, along with Victor Chernozhukov and Iván Fernández-Val, Angrist has also explored quantile regressions, showing that they minimize a weighted MSE loss function for specification error.
[64] In articles with Krueger as well as with Jorn-Steffen Pischke in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Angrist has repeatedly made the case for a focus on the identification of causality in economics, e.g. using instrumental variables;[65] in particular, Angrist has argued in 2010 in response to Edward Leamer's 1983 critique of econometrics that microeconomics had experienced since then a "credibility revolution" thanks to substantial improvements in empirical research designs and renewed attention to causal relationships.
He is the recipient of the 2011 John von Neumann Award given annually by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies in Budapest.
In the mid-1990s, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens solved this methodological problem, demonstrating how precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments.