Guido W. Imbens
Facts
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Stefan Bladh
Guido W. Imbens
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021
Born: 3 September 1963, Geldrop, the Netherlands
Affiliation at the time of the award: Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Prize motivation: “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”
Prize share: 1/4
Work
Many of the big questions in the social sciences deal with cause and effect. Some of these questions are possible to answer using natural experiments, in which chance events or policy changes result in groups of people being treated differently. In 1994, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens showed what conclusions about causation can be drawn from natural experiments in which people cannot be either forced or forbidden to participate in the programme being studied.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
