Joshua Angrist יהושע אנגריסט | |
|---|---|
 Angrist in 2011 | |
| Born | (1960-09-18)September 18, 1960 (age 65) Columbus, Ohio, U.S. |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Oberlin College (BA) Princeton University (MA,PhD) |
| Thesis | Econometric Analysis of the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery (1989) |
| Doctoral advisor | Orley Ashenfelter |
| Other advisors | David Card Whitney Newey |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Econometrics,labor economics |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral students | Esther Duflo Melissa Kearney Jeffrey R. Kling |
| Notable ideas | Local average treatment effect |
| Awards | Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2021) |
| Website | |
Joshua David Angrist (Hebrew:יהושע אנגריסט; born September 18, 1960)[1] is anIsraeli Americaneconomist and Ford Professor of Economics at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.[2] Angrist, together withGuido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021 "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".[3]
He ranks among the world's top economists inlabor economics,[4]urban economics,[5]econometrics, and theeconomics of education,[6] and is known for his use of quasi-experimental research designs (such asinstrumental variables) to study the effects of public policies and changes in economic or social circumstances. He is a co-founder and co-director ofMIT's Blueprint Labs, which researches the relationship betweenhuman capital andincome inequality in the U.S. He also cofounded Avela, an ed-tech startup that provides application and enrollment-related software and services to school districts, schools of all kinds, organizations likeTeach for America, and theU.S. military.
Angrist was born to a Jewish family inColumbus, Ohio, and raised inPittsburgh, where he graduated fromTaylor Allderdice High School in 1977.[7][8] Angrist received his B.A. in economics fromOberlin College in 1982. He lived inIsrael from 1982 until 1985 and served as aparatrooper in theIsraeli Defence Forces.[9] Angrist received anM.A. and aPh.D. in economics fromPrinceton University in 1987 and 1989, respectively. His doctoral dissertation,Econometric Analysis of theVietnam Era Draft Lottery, was supervised byOrley Ashenfelter[10] and later published in parts in theAmerican Economic Review.[11] After completing his Ph.D., Angrist joinedHarvard University as an assistant professor until 1991, when he returned to Israel as a senior lecturer (equivalent to an assistant professor in the US system) at theHebrew University.[12] After being promoted to associate professor at Hebrew University, he joinedMIT's Economics Department in 1996 as associate professor, before being raised to full professor in 1998. Since 2008, he has been MIT's Ford Professor of Economics and teacheseconometrics andlabor economics to its students. He additionally served as theWesley Clair Mitchell Visiting professor atColumbia University in 2018.[13] Angrist is affiliated with theNational Bureau of Economic Research,[14] theIZA Institute of Labor Economics, theAmerican Economic Association,American Statistical Association,Econometric Society,Population Association of America and theSociety of Labor Economists. In terms of professional service, he has performed editorial duties at the journalsEconometrica,American Economic Review,American Economic Journal: Applied Economics,Journal of Business and Economic Statistics,Economics Letters,Labour Economics and theJournal of Labor Economics.
Angrist holds dual US–Israeli citizenship[15] and lives inBrookline, Massachusetts.[7]
Angrist's research interests include the economics of education and school reform, social programs and the labor market, the effects of immigration, labor market regulation and institutions, and econometric methods for program and policy evaluation.[16] He ranks among the top 50 out of over 56,000 economists registered onIDEAS/RePEc in terms of research output.[17] He is a frequent co-author ofGuido Imbens,Alan B. Krueger,Victor Lavy,Parag Pathak andJörn-Steffen Pischke.[18] Together with Pischke, Angrist publishedMostly Harmless Econometrics in 2008, in which they explore econometric tools used by empirical researchers.[19] In 2014, Angrist and Pischke releasedMastering 'Metrics': The Path from Cause to Effect, which is targeted at undergraduate econometrics students.
The bulk of Angrist's research has concentrated on the economics of education, beginning with the returns to schooling. In one early study, Angrist and Krueger exploited the relationship between children's season of birth and educational attainment that is due to policies and laws setting ages for school start and compulsory schooling, finding that returns to education are close to theirOLS estimates[20] and that compulsory attendance laws constrain roughly 10% of students to stay in school who would have otherwise left.[21] Another early attempt at using IV to estimate returns to schooling by Angrist and Krueger was to exploit theVietnam-era draft lottery.[22] However, while their later research on split-sample IVs confirmed the findings of their compulsory schooling research, it failed to support the returns to schooling estimates derived from the draft-lottery research.[23] Angrist further used variation in U.S. compulsory schooling laws in research withDaron Acemoglu in order to estimate human-capitalexternalities, which they found to be about 1% and not statistically significant.[24] Angrist has also studied the strong decrease in the economic returns to schooling in theWest Bank andGaza Strip in the 1980s.[25] Together with Lavy, Angrist has also explored the returns to schooling inMorocco, exploiting a change in its language of instruction from French to Arabic to find that policy substantially reduced Moroccan youths' returns to schooling by deteriorating their French writing skills.[26]
Another strand of Angrist's research in the economics of education concerns the impact of various inputs and rules on learning. For instance, in further work with Lavy, Angrist exploitedMaimonides' rule, which limits class size to 40 students, in order to study the impact of class size on scholastic achievement inIsraeli schools, finding that class size reduction substantially increase test scores for 4th and 5th graders, albeit not for 3rd graders.[27] In further research at Israeli schools, they find that teacher training can cost-effectively improve students' test scores (at least in secular schools),[28] that computer-aided instruction doesn't[29] and that cash incentives raised high school achievement among girls (by inducing them to increase time invested into exam preparation) but were ineffective for boys.[30] Similarly, in a study by Angrist,Philip Oreopoulos and Daniel Lang comparing the impact of academic support services, financial incentives and a combination of both onCanadian college first-year students, the combined treatment raised the grades of women throughout their first and second years but had no impact on men.[31] In research onschool vouchers for private schools inColombia withEric Bettinger,Erik Bloom,Elizabeth King andMichael Kremer, Angrist found voucher recipients 10 pp more likely to finish lower secondary school, 5-7 pp more likely to complete high school, and to score 0.2 standard deviations higher on tests, suggesting that the vouchers' benefits likely exceeded their $24 cost.[32][33] Another subject of Angrist's research are peer effects in education,[34] which he has e.g. explored withKevin Lang in the context ofMETCO's school integrations or withAtila Abdulkadiroglu andParag Pathak inBoston's andNew York City's over-subscribed exam schools, though the effects that they find are brief and modest in both cases.[35][36] With regard to the effect of teacher testing, which Angrist has studied with Jonathan Guryan in the U.S., he finds that state-mandated teacher testing raises teachers' wages without raising their quality, though it decreases teacher diversity by reducing the fraction of new teachers who areHispanic.[37] In work with Lavy andAnalia Schlosser, Angrist has also exploredBecker's hypothesis on a trade-off between child quality and quantity by exploiting variation in twin births and parental preferences for compositions of siblings of mixed sexes, with evidence rejecting the hypothesis.[38]
Since the late 2000s, Angrist has conducted extensive research oncharter schools in the U.S. with Pathak, Abdulkadiroglu,Susan Dynarski,Thomas Kane, andChristopher Walters. For instance, studying theKIPP Lynn Academy, they estimate that KIPP Lynn attendance increased students' math scores by 0.35 SD and theirEnglish scores by 0.12 SD,[39] with most of the gains accruing to students with limited English proficiency or special education needs or those who scored low at baseline.[40] Beyond KIPP Lynn, they find attendance to Boston charter schools to generally increase test scores for middle and high school students, especially for schools with binding assignment lotteries, whereas pilot schools (public schools covered by some collective bargaining provisions and more independence concerning educational policies) generally have at best statistically insignificant or small effects on students' test scores.[41] Further research has attributed the relative efficacy of urban charter schools to these schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to urban education which emphasizes student discipline and behaviour, traditional reading and math skills, instruction time, and selective teacher hiring.[42]
Similar to his research on the economics of education, Angrist's research on labor economics also often seeks to exploit quasi-natural experiments to identify causal relationships. In a publication derived from his dissertation, Angrist e.g. exploits themilitary draft lottery during theVietnam War to estimate that fighting inVietnam reduced veterans' lifetime earnings by about 15% relative to those of nonveterans.[43] Taking into accountveterans' benefits that subsidized education and training (e.g. through theG.I. Bill), he finds that these benefits raised schooling in the U.S. by ca. 1.4 years and veterans' earnings by 6%.[44] In further work exploiting the idiosyncrasies of U.S. military recruitment, Angrist studies the labor market impact of voluntary military service in the 1980s, estimating that voluntary soldiers serving in the 1980s earned considerably more than comparable civilians while serving and experienced comparatively higher employment rates thereafter, even though it raised their long-run civilian earnings at best modestly and - for whites - reduced them.[45] Together with Krueger, Angrist also investigated with Krueger whether U.S.World War II veterans earned more than nonveterans, finding instead that they earned at most as much as comparable nonveterans.[46] Angrist and Krueger later on summarized their work on causality in labor economics in a chapter of theHandbook of Labor Economics, with special emphasis oncontrols forconfounding variables,fixed effects models anddifference-in-differences,instrumental variables estimation andregression discontinuity designs.[47] In another study related to the U.S. military, Angrist and John H. Johnson IV use theGulf War to estimate the effects of work-related separations on military families, showing large differences between the impact of male and female soldiers' deployment on divorce rates and spousal labor supply.[48] In work withWilliam Evans, Angrist exploited families' preference for having siblings of mixed sex to estimate children's impact on parental labor supply, observing that family size had no impact on husbands' labor supply and that the impact on women was being overestimated throughOLS.[49] In further work with Evans, he also explored the impact of the 1970 state abortion reforms on schooling and labor market outcomes, arguing that they reduced Afro-American teen fertility and thereby raised black women's rates of high school completion, college attendance and employment.[50] In another study with Acemoglu, Angrist has also analysed the consequences of theAmericans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), finding a sharp drop in employment of persons with disabilities (PwDs) shortly after its inception, thus suggesting that ADA has likely hurt PwDs' labor market outcomes.[51] Angrist has also studied the U.S. marriage market, finding—by exploiting endogamy in marriages—that high male-female sex ratios increased the likelihood of female marriage and decreased theirlabor force participation.[52] Together withAdriana Kugler, Angrist finds that labor market institutions that reduce labor market flexibility exacerbate native job losses from immigration, especially regarding restricted product markets.[53] Angrist and Kugler also investigated the relationship betweencoca prices and civil conflict inColombia, observing that financial opportunities offered by coca cultivation fueled the conflict, with cultivated rural areas witnessing pronounced increases in violence.[54]
Besides his empirical research, Angrist has also made major contributions toeconometrics, especially concerning the use ofinstrumental variables estimations. For instance, Angrist developed atwo-stage least squares (2SLS) equivalent of the efficientWald estimator.[55] Together withGuido Imbens, he developed the concept oflocal average treatment effects and showed how to identify and to estimate them,[56] and how to use 2SLS to estimate the average causal effect of variable treatments.[57] In further work with Imbens andDonald Rubin, Angrist then showed how instrumental variables can be embedded within theRubin causal model in order to identify causal effects between variables.[58] Angrist also developed with Imbens and Krueger so-called "jackknife instrumental variables estimators" to address the bias in 2SLS estimates in over-identified models[59] and has explored the interpretation of IV estimators insimultaneous equations models along with Imbens andKathryn Graddy.[60] Again with Imbens, along withAlberto Abadie, he has also studied the effect of subsidized training due to theJob Training Partnership Act of 1982 on the quantiles of trainee earnings, finding large effects of JTPA on low-wage female workers but significant effects on men only for the upper half of the male trainee earnings distribution.[61] With regard to limited dependent variable models with binary endogenous regressors, Angrist argues in favour of using 2SLS, multiplicative models for conditional means, linear approximation of non-linear causal models, models for distribution effects, andquantile regression with an endogenous binary regressor.[62] Angrist has also explored the link between local average treatment effects and population average treatment effects, i.e., theexternal validity of IV estimates.[63] Finally, along withVictor Chernozhukov and Iván Fernández-Val, Angrist has also exploredquantile regressions, showing that they minimize a weightedMSE loss function for specification error.[64]
In articles with Krueger as well as with Jorn-Steffen Pischke in theJournal of Economic Perspectives, Angrist has repeatedly made the case for a focus on the identification of causality in economics, e.g. using instrumental variables;[65] in particular, Angrist has argued in 2010 in response toEdward Leamer's 1983 critique of econometrics that microeconomics had experienced since then a "credibility revolution" thanks to substantial improvements in empirical research designs and renewed attention to causal relationships.[66]
Angrist is a Research Fellow at theInstitute for the Study of Labor (IZA). He is also a fellow of theEconometric Society. He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.[67] In 2007 Angrist received an honorary doctorate in economics from theUniversity of St. Gallen. He is the recipient of the 2011John von Neumann Award given annually by theRajk László College for Advanced Studies in Budapest.
Angrist, along withGuido Imbens, won the 2021Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.[68] The two men received one-half of the prize money of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14 million U.S.); the rest went to the other winner,David Card.[69] TheRoyal Swedish Academy of Sciences wrote that:
Data from a natural experiment are difficult to interpret... . For example, extending compulsory education bya year for one group of students (but not another) will not affect everyone in that group in the same way. Some students would have kept studying anyway and, for them, the value of education is often not representative of the entire group. So, is it even possible to draw any conclusions about the effect of an extra year in school? In the mid-1990s, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens solved this methodological problem, demonstrating how precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments.[3]
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Italics indicate a Nobel Memorial Prize, i.e. not one of the original Prizes bequested byAlfred Nobel. |
