Joshua Angrist

For instance, in further work with Lavy, Angrist exploited Maimonides' rule, which limits class size to 40 students, in order to study the impact of class size on scholastic achievement in Israeli schools, finding that class size reduction substantially increase test scores for 4th and 5th graders, albeit not for 3rd graders.

In further research at Israeli schools, they find that teacher training can cost-effectively improve students' test scores (at least in secular schools), that computer-aided instruction doesn't and that cash incentives raised high school achievement among girls (by inducing them to increase time invested into exam preparation) but were ineffective for boys.

Similarly, in a study by Angrist, Philip Oreopoulos and Daniel Lang comparing the impact of academic support services, financial incentives and a combination of both on Canadian college first-year students, the combined treatment raised the grades of women throughout their first and second years but had no impact on men.

In research on school vouchers for private schools in Colombia with Eric Bettinger, Erik Bloom, Elizabeth King and Michael Kremer, Angrist found voucher recipients 10 pp more likely to finish lower secondary school, 5-7 pp more likely to complete high school, and to score 0.2 standard deviations higher on tests, suggesting that the vouchers' benefits likely exceeded their $24 cost.

Another subject of Angrist's research are peer effects in education, which he has e.g. explored with Kevin Lang in the context of METCO's school integrations or with Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak in Boston's and New York City's over-subscribed exam schools, though the effects that they find are brief and modest in both cases.

With regard to the effect of teacher testing, which Angrist has studied with Jonathan Guryan in the U.S., he finds that state-mandated teacher testing raises teachers' wages without raising their quality, though it decreases teacher diversity by reducing the fraction of new teachers who are Hispanic.

In work with Lavy and Analia Schlosser, Angrist has also explored Becker's hypothesis on a trade-off between child quality and quantity by exploiting variation in twin births and parental preferences for compositions of siblings of mixed sexes, with evidence rejecting the hypothesis.

Joshua David Angrist (born September 18, 1960) is an Israeli–American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Angrist, together with Guido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021 "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".

He ranks among the world's top economists in labor economics, urban economics, and the economics of education, and is known for his use of quasi-experimental research designs (such as instrumental variables) to study the effects of public policies and changes in economic or social circumstances.

He is a co-founder and co-director of the MIT's School Effectiveness & Inequality Initiative, which studies the relationship between human capital and income inequality in the U.S.

Angrist was born to a Jewish family in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1977.

Angrist has also studied the strong decrease in the economic returns to schooling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1980s.

Together with Lavy, Angrist has also explored the returns to schooling in Morocco, exploiting a change in its language of instruction from French to Arabic to find that policy substantially reduced Moroccan youths' returns to schooling by deteriorating their French writing skills.

Another strand of Angrist's research in the economics of education concerns the impact of various inputs and rules on learning.

Angrist received his B.A. in economics from Oberlin College in 1982.

He lived in Israel from 1982 until 1985 and served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defence Forces.

Angrist received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1987 and 1989, respectively.

His doctoral dissertation, Econometric Analysis of the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery, was supervised by Orley Ashenfelter and later published in parts in the American Economic Review.

After completing his Ph.D., Angrist joined Harvard University as an assistant professor until 1991, when he returned to Israel as a senior lecturer (equivalent to an Assistant Professor in the US system) at the Hebrew University.

After being promoted to associate professor at Hebrew University, he joined MIT's Economics Department in 1996 as associate professor, before being raised to full professor in 1998.

Since the late 2000s, Angrist has conducted extensive research on charter schools in the U.S. with Pathak, Abdulkadiroglu, Susan Dynarski, Thomas Kane, and Christopher Walters.

For instance, studying the KIPP Lynn Academy, they estimate that KIPP Lynn attendance increased students' math scores by 0.35 SD and their English scores by 0.12 SD, with most of the gains accruing to students with limited English proficiency or special education needs or those who scored low at baseline.

Beyond KIPP Lynn, they find attendance to Boston charter schools to generally increase test scores for middle and high school students, especially for schools with binding assignment lotteries, whereas pilot schools (public schools covered by some collective bargaining provisions and more independence concerning educational policies) generally have at best statistically insignificant or small effects on students' test scores.

Further research has attributed the relative efficacy of urban charter schools to these schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to urban education which emphasizes student discipline and behaviour, traditional reading and math skills, instruction time, and selective teacher hiring.

Since 2008, he has been MIT's Ford Professor of Economics and teaches econometrics and labor economics to its students.

Together with Pischke, Angrist published Mostly Harmless Econometrics in 2009, in which they explore econometric tools used by empirical researchers.

In 2014, Angrist and Pischke released Mastering 'Metrics': The Path from Cause to Effect, which is targeted at undergraduate econometrics students.

The bulk of Angrist's research has concentrated on the economics of education, beginning with the returns to schooling.

In one early study, Angrist and Krueger exploited the relationship between children's season of birth and educational attainment that is due to policies and laws setting ages for school start and compulsory schooling, finding that returns to education are close to their OLS estimates and that compulsory attendance laws constrain roughly 10% of students to stay in school who would have otherwise left.

Another early attempt at using IV to estimate returns to schooling by Angrist and Krueger was to exploit the Vietnam-era draft lottery.

However, while their later research on split-sample IVs confirmed the findings of their compulsory schooling research, it failed to support the returns to schooling estimates derived from the draft-lottery research.

Angrist further used variation in U.S. compulsory schooling laws in research with Daron Acemoglu in order to estimate human-capital externalities, which they found to be about 1% and not statistically significant.

He additionally served as the Wesley Clair Mitchell Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2018.

Angrist is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, the American Economic Association, American Statistical Association, Econometric Society, Population Association of America and the Society of Labor Economists.

In terms of professional service, he has performed editorial duties at the journals Econometrica, American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Economics Letters, Labour Economics and the Journal of Labor Economics.

Angrist holds dual US–Israeli citizenship and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Angrist's research interests include the economics of education and school reform, social programs and the labor market, the effects of immigration, labor market regulation and institutions, and econometric methods for program and policy evaluation.

He ranks among the top 50 out of over 56,000 economists registered on IDEAS/RePEc in terms of research output.

He is a frequent co-author of Guido Imbens, Alan B. Krueger, Victor Lavy, Parag Pathak and Jörn-Steffen Pischke.