David Card

David Card is Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley and a 2021 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (shared with Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens). His most famous research, conducted with Alan Krueger in the early 1990s, used a natural experiment (comparing fast food employment in New Jersey before and after a minimum wage increase, versus neighboring Pennsylvania as a control) to find no evidence that minimum wage increases reduce employment — overturning what had been the economic consensus for decades. This research transformed both the methodology and conclusions of labor economics, demonstrating that the competitive market model does not always apply to low-wage labor markets where employers have some monopsony power. Card has also conducted pioneering research on the labor market effects of immigration (challenging the view that immigrants harm native workers), the returns to education, union wage effects, and racial discrimination in labor markets. His natural experiment methodology, combined with Angrist and Imbens' work on instrumental variables, transformed empirical economic research.