Cause and effect and evidence-based policy

David Card is a labor economist and professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has done pioneering economic analysis in the area of the minimum wage, immigration and racial disparities in education. In 2021 he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work that challenged orthodoxy and dramatically shifted understanding of inequality and the social and economic forces that affect low-wage workers. Much of Card’s most profound work is based on “natural experiments” — looking not at theoretical constructs, but at how economic dynamics played out in the real world.