Joshua Angrist

Origins and early life

Joshua David Angrist was born in Columbus, Ohio, on 18 September 1960, while his parents were graduate students at Ohio State, and grew up in Pittsburgh, where they went on to teach at Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon. He was born into a Jewish family: his mother grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household in Montreal, the daughter of immigrants from Lithuania, his father in Dallas in a family from Ukraine and Poland, and they met at a Hillel-run Jewish summer camp.

He left school after eleventh grade in 1977, worked for a year, then studied economics at Oberlin College, with a year at the London School of Economics, and graduated in 1982.

Work and career

He then moved to Israel to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, became a citizen in 1983, served two years in the Israel Defense Forces and in 1985 married Miriam Poznanski, a student he had met there. He took his doctorate at Princeton in 1989 with a thesis on the Vietnam-era draft lottery, using it to measure the long-run effect of military service on earnings. With Alan Krueger he used quarter of birth, which governs how long the law keeps a child in school, to estimate the return to schooling in a paper of 1991, and with Victor Lavy he used Maimonides' Rule, which caps Israeli elementary-school classes at forty, to measure the effect of class size.

In 1994 he and Guido Imbens showed what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments in which people cannot be forced or forbidden to take part in the programme studied. After posts at Harvard and the Hebrew University, he joined MIT in 1996, where he is Ford Professor of Economics and co-founded what is now Blueprint Labs.

Recognition

The 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences went half to David Card and half jointly to Angrist and Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”.