Guido Wilhelmus Imbens was born on 3 September 1963 in Geldrop, the Netherlands.[9][10] As a child, Imbens was an avid chess player.[11] In a 2021 interview, Imbens connected his passion for econometrics to his childhood interest in the game.[12]
In high school Imbens was introduced to the work of Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen. Influenced by Tinbergen's work, Imbens chose to study econometrics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where Tinbergen had taught and established a program in econometrics.[13] Imbens graduated with a Candidate's degree in Econometrics from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1983. He subsequently obtained an M.Sc. degree with distinction in Economics and Econometrics from the University of Hull in Kingston upon Hull, UK in 1986.[1]
In 1986, one of Imbens' mentors at the University of Hull, Anthony Lancaster, moved to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Imbens followed Lancaster to Brown to pursue further graduate and doctoral studies.[14] Imbens received an A.M. and a Ph.D. degree in economics from Brown in 1989 and 1991, respectively.[15][1][16]
Working with fellow economists including Joshua Angrist and Alan Krueger, Imbens focused on developing methodologies and frameworks that help economists use a kind of real-life situations known as natural experiments to test hypotheses about causal relationships, such as the impact of additional years of school education on earnings.[24] His frameworks for causal relationships study found use in multiple other fields including social and biomedical sciences.[25] It provided researchers with tools to understand the limitations of real-world experiments, improving their ability to better understand the effects of field and experimental data based interventions.[18]
In one of his earliest collaborations with Angrist, Imbens introduced a concept called Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) to draw causal inference from observational data. In a 1994 Econometrica paper titled "Identification and Estimation of Local Average Treatment Effects", the pair employed the idea of natural experiments, where one studies the effects of key changes by using chance and randomization that naturally occur in the real world, instead of controlled conditions, which can be expensive, time-consuming, or even unethical.[5][18] The paper and the concept had significant impact on other research efforts across econometrics, statistics and other fields.[6][8]
In a 2001 paper, Imbens partnered with statistician Donald Rubin and economist Bruce Sacerdote to study the impact of unearned earnings on labor supply, i.e. the implications of policy interventions such as Universal Basic Income or other federal and state wage assistance programs on citizens' willingness to participate in the labor force and the eventual impact on labor supply.[26] To devise a natural experiment, the group studied the winners of the Massachusetts state lottery where the winners were paid incrementally over many years as opposed to a lump-sum payment. In doing so, the group was able to study the causal effects of guaranteed income. They found that winning the lottery had only a small impact on how much people worked. Winners of $80,000 a year for 20 years reduced their working hours somewhat, but winners of $15,000 a year for 20 years did not. Among unemployed persons who played the lottery, winners worked more than non-winners in the six years after playing.[18][27]
Some of Imbens' work was summarized in a 2015 book co-written with American statistician Donald B. Rubin, Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences.[25]
Around 2016, he (along with his wife Susan Athey) worked on using machine learning methods, particularly modifications to random forests called causal forests, to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in causal inference models.[28][29]
Imbens received the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with fellow economists David Card and Joshua Angrist for their contributions toward methodologies for the analysis of causal relationships.[30] In its press release, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that they "have provided us with new insights about the labour market and shown what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments. Their approach has spread to other fields and revolutionised empirical research."[31]
Personal life
Imbens has been married to fellow economist Susan Athey since 2002.[32] Athey likewise teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where she holds the Economics of Technology Professorship.[33] The best man at Imbens and Athey's wedding was Joshua Angrist, with whom Imbens would share the Nobel prize 19 years later.[34]
(with Lisa M. Lynch) Re-employment probabilities over the business cycle. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1993.
(with Richard H. Spady and Philip Johnson) Information Theoretic Approaches to Inference in Moment Condition Models. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1995.
(with Gary Chamberlain) Nonparametric applications of Bayesian inference. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1996.
(with Donald B. Rubin and Bruce Sacerdote) Estimating the effect of unearned income on labor supply, earnings, savings, and consumption : evidence from a survey of lottery players. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1999.
(with V. Joseph Hotz and Jacob Alex Klerman) The long-term gains from GAIN : a re-analysis of the impacts of the California GAIN Program. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2000.
(with Thomas Lemieux) Regression discontinuity designs: a guide to practice. Cambridge, Mass. : National Bureau of Economic Research, 2007.
(with Jeffrey M. Wooldridge) Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation. Cambridge, Mass. : National Bureau of Economic Research, 2008.
(with Karthik Kalyanaraman) Optimal bandwidth choice for the regression discontinuity estimator. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009.
(with Alberto Abadie) A martingale representation for matching estimators. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009.
^Irel, Corydon; Office, Harvard News (15 March 2007). "Bringing hard science to economics". Harvard Gazette. Archived from the original on 14 August 2021. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
^Imbens, Guido Wilhelmus (1991). Two essays in econometrics (Ph.D. thesis). Brown University. OCLC26957442. ProQuest303881903.
^"KNAW kiest 26 nieuwe leden" (in Dutch). Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. 10 May 2017. Archived from the original on 25 May 2019. Retrieved 14 May 2017.
^ abImbens, Guido W.; Rubin, Donald B. (2015). Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-88588-1.
^"The Prize in Economic Sciences 2021"(PDF) (Press release). Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. 11 October 2021. Archived(PDF) from the original on 11 October 2021. Retrieved 11 October 2021.
^"Susan Athey". Stanford Graduate School of Business. Retrieved 24 March 2022.
^De Witte, Melissa; Than, Ker (11 October 2021). "Guido Imbens wins Nobel in economic sciences". Stanford University. Archived from the original on 11 October 2021. Retrieved 11 October 2021. Angrist served as the best man at Imbens' wedding to Susan Athey, who is also an economist at Stanford.
