David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens win Nobel Economics Prize

US experts take final award in Nobel season

Guido W. Imbens, Joshua Angrist, and David Card. AFP

Three US experts have won the Nobel Prize for Economics for drawing on everyday life to answer "society's big questions", bringing a close to this year's Nobel pageantry.

David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens were credited with using unplanned natural experiments to make discoveries about schools and the labour market.

Dr Card, for example, looked at the effect of education and immigration on the labour market, finding that resources in schools were important for pupils' future success. Dr Angrist and Dr Imbens studied how an additional year of compulsory schooling would affect pupils.

"Their research has substantially improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which has been of great benefit to society,” Peter Fredriksson, chairman of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee said.

"The key is to use situations in which chance events or policy changes result in groups of people being treated differently, in a way that resembles clinical trials in medicine," Nobel jurors said in their citation.

The economics prize was not part of the original bequest by Alfred Nobel in 1895, but was added later. It is the sixth and final award of this year's Nobel season.

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to two journalists, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, who were honoured for standing up for free expression under repressive conditions in the Philippines and Russia respectively.

Tanzanian-born writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, who lives in the UK, won the literature prize after portraying the fate of refugees in his novels.

David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian won the medicine prize for analysing how people experience touch and temperature. The chemistry prize went to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan, who pioneered a new way of building molecules.

Three scientists shared the physics prize for helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding humanity's understanding of climate change.