Book Joshua Angrist

Joshua Angrist is an Israeli American economist and the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2021 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Guido Imbens for methodological work on analyzing cause and effect. He is a leading authority on labor markets, cities, education and econometric methods, known for using natural experiments and quasi-experimental tools such as instrumental variables to measure how public policies and changing circumstances actually affect people. Raised in Pittsburgh, he earned his bachelor's degree at Oberlin College, served as a paratrooper in Israel, and completed his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1989 with a dissertation on the Vietnam-era draft lottery. He taught at Harvard before building his career at MIT, where he co-founded and co-directs Blueprint Labs, which studies human capital and income inequality. He also co-founded Avela, an education technology company serving school districts and other organizations. He co-wrote the influential text Mostly Harmless Econometrics and received the John von Neumann Award in 2011. Angrist speaks on evidence-based policy, education and economic opportunity.