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Nobel Winners Found Economic Experiments in the Real World
Their research improved our understanding of everything from minimum wages and education to military service and lottery winnings.
From left: David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens.
Source: Nobel Prize Outreach
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How can the impact of economic policies be measured? One solution is to look for what’s called a “natural experiment,” or a place where a policy’s design — or possibly even nature itself — has created an implicit comparison between affected and unaffected groups.
For their efforts to refine the art of the natural experiment, David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens were awarded this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.