Joshua Angrist

Joshua Angrist is Ford Professor of Economics at MIT and a 2021 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (shared with David Card and Guido Imbens). He is one of the central figures in the "credibility revolution" in empirical economics — the shift toward research designs that credibly identify causal effects rather than simply documenting correlations. Angrist's work on instrumental variables (IV) methods, particularly the local average treatment effect (LATE) framework developed with Imbens, clarified what IV estimates actually identify when instruments affect only a subset of the population — a major conceptual clarification that influenced a generation of applied economists. His book "Mostly Harmless Econometrics" (co-authored with Jörn-Steffen Pischke) became the defining guide to modern empirical research methods in economics, widely adopted in PhD programs globally. His research topics span military service and earnings, education returns, school choice, and labor market policy.