- Person
- Joshua Angrist
- Lived
- b. 1960
- Field
- Economics, econometrics
- From
- American-Israeli
The story
Joshua Angrist was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1960 to a Jewish family; his mother grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household in Montreal and his father’s family had fled pogroms in Odessa. After serving in the Israeli army and studying at Princeton, he set out to answer questions that matter for public policy but cannot easily be tested with randomized trials, such as whether more schooling or smaller classes really make a difference.
His solution was to find natural experiments, situations in which chance or an arbitrary rule sorts people into groups much as a lottery would. His doctoral thesis used the Vietnam-era draft lottery, which selected men for service by drawing birth dates, to measure the effect of military service on later earnings. With Alan Krueger he used the fact that school-leaving laws let children born early in the year leave school sooner to estimate that an extra year of education raised earnings by about nine percent. With Victor Lavy he used Maimonides’ rule, Israel’s cap of 40 pupils per class, which makes classes split abruptly when enrolment passes 40, to show that smaller classes raised test scores in the fourth and fifth grades.
In 1994 Angrist and Guido Imbens solved a key problem in interpreting such studies. Because a lottery or rule changes the behaviour of only some people, they showed exactly whose outcome it measures, which they called the local average treatment effect. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their framework radically changed how researchers approach empirical questions.
Angrist then used the same tools to judge schools. Oversubscribed charter schools in Boston must admit pupils by lottery, so with Parag Pathak and others he compared lottery winners with losers. Their research documented large test score gains at Boston’s charter schools, especially for low-scoring pupils and those learning English. In 2011 Angrist and Pathak founded what is now Blueprint Labs at MIT, a non-partisan lab that works with school districts and government agencies to measure the effects of policies in education, health care and the workforce, such as Boston’s universal preschool programme.
The approach he helped develop is now standard for evaluating social programmes, giving policymakers a way to tell what actually works before spending public money on it.
Why it matters
Angrist’s natural-experiment methods let governments and school districts measure the true effects of schools, training and social programmes, so that public money goes to what works.
About Joshua Angrist
MIT economist who showed how to find cause and effect in natural experiments, methods now used to judge schools, health and job programmes. Nobel Prize 2021.
Sources
- Popular information: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2021 NobelPrize.org
- Joshua D. Angrist, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- About Blueprint Labs, MIT
- Joshua Angrist Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.