Joshua Angrist

Short Bio

Joshua Angrist is the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, a co-founder and director of MIT's Blueprint Labs, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. A dual U.S. and Israeli citizen, Angrist taught at Harvard and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before coming to MIT in 1996. Angrist received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1982 and completed his Ph.D. in Economics at Princeton in 1989.

Angrist has developed innovative ways to harness the power of natural experiments to answer important economic questions, transforming empirical research. These new econometric tools help social scientists and policy-makers discover the causal effects of choices and policy changes. Angrist’s research is not only methodological. In dozens of studies, he explores the economics of education and school reform; the impact of social programs on the labor market; the labor market effects of immigration, regulation, and institutions.

Angrist received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2021 (with Co-Laureates Guido Imbens and David Card). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has served on many editorial boards and as a co-editor of the Journal of Labor Economics. Angrist received an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) in 2007.

An accomplished author, Angrist co-authored Mostly Harmless Economics: An Empiricist's Companion and Mastering 'Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect with Steve Pischke. These are among the most widely used econometrics texts and are certainly the funniest. Through this work and their ongoing scholarship, Angrist and Pischke hope to bring undergraduate econometrics instruction out of the Stones Age.