Joshua Angrist

Joshua David Angrist (born September 18, 1960) is an Israeli-American economist and the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Angrist earned a B.A. in economics from Oberlin College in 1982 and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989. He is renowned for his methodological contributions to econometrics, particularly in developing and applying techniques such as instrumental variables and natural experiments to identify causal effects in labor economics and beyond. In 2021, Angrist was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with David Card and Guido Imbens, for providing an empirical approach to causal analysis that has transformed the analysis of labor markets and other policy-relevant questions. As a co-founder of MIT's Blueprint Labs, he continues to advance evidence-based policy through rigorous empirical research.

Joshua David Angrist was born on September 18, 1960, in Columbus, Ohio, to parents pursuing graduate studies at Ohio State University following his father's military service. His family relocated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when he was three years old, where his father, Stanley Angrist, accepted a faculty position at Carnegie Mellon University and his mother, Sarah Angrist, also worked in academia. Raised in a Jewish family in Pittsburgh's Shadyside neighborhood, Angrist attended local public schools, including synagogue services at the Hebrew Institute of Pittsburgh, and later recalled a typical urban childhood involving biking, band practice, and occasional skipping of Hebrew school.