David Card Nobel Prize press conference at UC Berkeley: transcript

Key points

• Berkeley officials said Card won for contributions to labor economics, the sixth Nobel in its economics department and the 26th for Berkeley faculty.
• Colleagues praised Card as a mentor and teacher, noting he won the department's best advisor award several times.
• Card credited Orley Ashenfelter and the late Alan Krueger, saying Krueger would have shared the prize had he been alive.
• He explained his minimum wage study comparing New Jersey and Pennsylvania and his study of the Mariel boatlift in Miami as natural experiments.
• Card said the main lesson of his work is that employers have some discretion in setting wages, and that economics cannot settle the trade-off between wages and profits.
• He said economics is becoming more empirical and team-based, with access to very large datasets such as tax records.

Chapters

1. 0:06Welcome and announcement of the 2021 Nobel Prize
2. 1:23Chancellor and deans praise Card's work
3. 4:49Economics chair on Card as colleague and mentor
4. 6:28Card thanks mentors, co-authors and Berkeley
5. 9:48Press conference rules and first questions
6. 11:22Natural experiments: minimum wage and Mariel boatlift
7. 15:22Thinking the call was a joke and plans for the day
8. 17:03Relevance of the research and policy debates
9. 21:55Future of economics and why the work was disputed
10. 26:19Reaction to the prize and closing thanks

Full transcript

0:06Hello, from UC Berkeley, where we are incredibly excited to share in the news that for the second consecutive year, a member of our vaunted faculty has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Professor David Card, who was recognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his contributions to labor economics, has been awarded the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. They'll be sharing that award with Joshua Angrist and Guido Inbens, who coincidentally was also a member of our faculty from 2002 to 2006.

0:45I'm Roque Montez, Director of Communications with UC Berkeley, and I'm joined today by Chancellor Carol Christ, Raka Ray, Shakar Kariv, and of course, our honored guest, David Card. I'd like now to turn it over to Chancellor Chris for introductions. Thank you, Roque. Today I'm so delighted to be sharing our wonderful news that Berkeley Professor David Card has been awarded to the 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel.

1:23For his contributions to labor economics. This is the sixth Nobel Prize that has been awarded to UC Berkeley's acclaimed Department of Economics. I will shortly turn over the podium, as it were, to Raka Ray, Chair of the Division of Social Sciences in our College of Letters and Science. Professor Ray will introduce the Chair of the Department of Economics, Shakar Khareev. the science of economics and the work of professor card has shaped our understanding of the most critical issues of our time wages immigration the value of higher education and gender and race disparities in labor markets in the words of members of the nobel committee professor card's work has improved our understanding of labor markets and completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences, challenging conventional wisdom.

2:19This last part, challenging conventional wisdom, is part of Berkeley's DNA. It's what happens in our classrooms and laboratories. It's what leads to inspiration, discovery, and new knowledge. It's what sets Berkeley apart and what makes this place the most exciting place to work and study. And it is what leads to the kind of recognition that we're celebrating today. Professor Card's Nobel Prize is the 26th awarded to UC Berkeley faculty members.

2:50As Chancellor, I couldn't be more proud of Professor Card and his colleagues in the Department of Economics. And you may know what's coming next. Yes, Professor Card, in addition to your Nobel Prize, and indeed because of it, I'm pleased to award you a highly coveted parking space near your office. a rare honor bestowed on UC Berkeley's Nobel Prize winners. I've been told that like many Berkeley faculty members, you actually ride your bike to work. So let me see how we might go about creating a special place for you to park it in.

3:24I'm now delighted to introduce Professor Raka Ray, Dean of the Division of Social Sciences in UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Science. Thank you, Carol. It's a source of great joy and pride to the to the Division of the Social Sciences at Berkeley that David Card has won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this year. For the economics community at UC Berkeley, this is a wonderful acknowledgement of the contributions made by the faculty at this great public university.

3:56At a time when inequality has polarized the country, not just economically, but socially. It's fitting that Berkeley, an institution known globally for being at the cutting edge of progressive social and economic research should yet again be at the forefront. David Card's work has addressed the four most important economic issues of our times. The minimum wage, skills and wages, immigration and school quality. His work in the 1990s on immigration and the effects of the minimum wage on employment ran counter to the then common sense understanding of these issues, and his revolutionary thinking was buttressed by his use of natural experiments and his deep belief in the power of economics as an empirical science.

4:49Dave is not just a great scholar, but a great mentor and institution builder. Let me now turn the podium over to Shahar Kariv, the Chair of the Economics Department, with a final word of congratulations to David Card for this momentous award. Shahar. Thank you, Raka, and congratulations, Dave. So Dave has built the field of labor economics at Berkeley and has his fingerprints on all other fields of the department.

5:22I can say that, above all, he's just a delightful colleague, he's intellectually honest, he's tough-minded, but flexible when he needs to be, and is ready to give advice on others' work as to accept it on his own. Dave loves his work, it shows, and it's contagious. And his independent thinking always leads him to the fundamental issues, no matter what the subject is really.

5:53I can also tell you that Dave is our teaching ninja. He has an outstanding, engaging and inspiring teacher and has a remarkable record of advising and mentoring that is legendary, not only at Berkeley, but in the entire profession. After our PhD students awarded him our best advisor award in 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2009, and 2010.

6:28I think I'm not missing any year, Dave. I'm sorry if I do. They decided to adapt a no-repeat rule to allow some other faculty a chance to win the award, but it is now common knowledge in the department that Dave is essentially permanently recognized for this award. what i always find even more remarkable is that dave has set himself up as a mentor to the large and diverse pool of berkeley undergraduate students of whom many headed to graduate school in economics mostly through dave's uh inspiration um david we really feel privileged and honored to be your colleagues and friends uh congratulations the floor is yours as always oh well thank you uh carol and raka and shahar for this uh very kind introduction um i don't have too much to say i i um i feel like my career has been uh greatly benefited from so many people my

7:34teachers my students my colleagues the support of my wife so so many people have helped me along the away, that I am not entirely sure that I should be the one person that's singled out for an award. I want to say that there is a couple of people that were extremely important in my background. One was Orly Ashenfelter, who was my thesis advisor, one of my first co-authors.

8:08I continue to work with him. We just finished a paper last week. and Orly was really instrumental in setting up back in the 1980s or even into the 70s kind of a revolutionary change in the way economists do research and I've really benefited from the inspiration that he provided. And the other person I really have to mention is Alan Kruger who was my co-author on many papers including the minimum wage paper that is cited and by the Nobel committee and also work that we did on school quality and on racial inequality and other topics. And I'm sure that if Alan was still with us, that he would have been sharing this prize with me. So it's, I think I just have to bring that up. I would also say that being at Berkeley has been, I spent the first half of my career at Princeton, but moving to Berkeley has been a great source of rejuvenation for me. We have an amazing set of graduate students and

9:11undergraduate students and great faculty, and there's a continuing flow of new ideas and new people. And people that are enthusiastic and really want to learn and to try and push the frontiers in many different directions. And I've really benefited from that and hopefully been able to help a few of them move a little bit further along and push the field in whatever direction it's going to go in the future. Thank you, Professor Card. And before I turn it, open it up for questions, I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Kara Menke, who's got some housekeeping rules. Kara?

9:48Thank you. My name is Kara Manke. I'm a science writer at UC Berkeley. Congratulations again to Professor Card and welcome to all the reporters who are joining us on the Zoom call and everyone who is streaming on YouTube and Facebook. So I ask that all the reporters please keep yourselves on mute. If you have questions, please submit them to me via the chat and I will call on you to unmute yourself and ask the question that you have for David Card. I will also be dropping in a link to a Google Drive folder that we will be updating throughout the day with additional photos and video for you. So to get us started, I have the first question from our Berkeley's own Will Cain.

10:36David, you work with so many graduate students, what will you tell them about this award? And what does it mean for young academics to have their mentors and instructors recognized in this way. Uh, well, uh, Well, I'm not exactly sure. I haven't given that any thought, really. I think that people doing research these days in economics is much more like many of the scientific fields in that people are part of a big team, and oftentimes there's almost a lab-like environment, And so people can benefit by being part of the team and for having a victory for the team.

11:22So I guess I would say that think of this as a victory for the team. That's wonderful. We're also wondering if you could maybe explain a little bit about your research and some of the impacts that it's had. Well, I think that probably the thing that the Nobel Committee was thinking of was the idea of trying to learn about society and economic forces in society and the way people interact and so on um from from observing um disruptive or um unusual Events and trying to infer from those events, something about the way that we're, that our models are informed. And so, one example of that is this particular study that they mentioned that Alan Kruger and I did, looking at the effect of a minimum wage increase.

12:26and it's actually incredibly simple methodology essentially there was a we were living in new jersey and in the early 1990s the new jersey legislature decided that they were going to raise their minimum wage at the time a nearby state pennsylvania just literally a couple of miles away from princeton um had no such plans and so uh it's sort of set up a what we thought of as a um a quasi or natural experiment situation there'll be a set of um employers on one side of a state border that have to raise their wage and a set of employers on another side that don't otherwise business conditions people are kind of the same and so we we developed that idea and um did a kind of a collection of data from before the minimum wage went up and after and and reached our conclusions. And I think at the time, the conclusions were somewhat controversial.

13:26Quite a few economists were... Quite skeptical of our results. Alan's favorite phrase that we were accused many times at that time, you may recall there was a kind of a scandal about a research program called cold fusion. And we were accused of doing cold fusion economics many times. But anyway, the thing that I think has really influenced the field is more the idea of looking for these pivotal events or things that have happened that could potentially inform our theorizing and understanding of the world. Another example of a project that I did around the same time in 1980, Fidel Castro released a whole bunch of people from Cuba and over 150,000 of them eventually ended up moving to the United States, many of them staying in Miami. And so I studied what happened in the Miami labor market compared to other markets that had been fairly

14:28similar to Miami's in the period before this Mariel boatlift. Again the same exact idea of a simple analysis of a disruptive intervention or experiment. These days people call those things natural experiments and I think the Nobel committee especially pulled that out and they also in their award for Joshua Angrist mentioned exactly the same kind of an approach in a project he did with Alan Kruger. And so that's probably what I'm best known for is that pushing that kind of idea to try and learn about the world. I have done and I, many of my students have done actual randomized experiments as well. And of course, that's often the gold standard for evidence and it's something that should be thought of and tried and these days many, many economists are doing such experiments.

15:22and a couple years ago a team of development economists won nobel prize for that line of research which is closely related to the stuff that i do mostly professor card a lighter question i read somewhere that you thought that today's news was actually a joke can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, I have an old friend I met in ninth grade, English class, when the teacher threw a book at him and hit me by accident. And he's the kind of guy who would pull this stunt, leave a message on the answering machine that it was somebody from Sweden calling at two o'clock in the morning so i thought for sure that was him his name is tim uh but then the phone number actually was a swedish phone number so

16:23You know, if you punch it in, your cell phone says that number's in Sweden. So then I thought, well, maybe it isn't, Jim. Fantastic. Fantastic. What are your plans for the rest of the day, Professor? Besides sleep, that is. I've received a very large number of emails from friends and students and colleagues and people I've met and well-wishers all over the world, and I've been trying to answer them as best I can. That looks like that'll be a lot of a lot of the day. And then I guess there's quite a few people that would like to speak to me, you know, news agencies around the world.

17:03Thank you. Cara, have any questions come in? You're on mute. Sorry about that. No, we haven't had any questions come in, I think. Oh, I just had a question come in. um uh andros sakala would you like to unmute yourself and ask ask your question yeah sure thanks first congratulations and the second the question is how do you think the research you did and the methods you used are relevant for today's situation in the us and in the world.

17:43Well, research builds slowly and our understanding of the, you know, of the labor market or any economic phenomenon is always evolving. And so at any one point in time, a particular piece of research may have some influence, but a lot of times it takes many, many years and a lot of rethinking of how that evidence actually um either confirmed or um contradicted existing wisdom for instance in the minimum wage study um i think the main thing that's really come out of that contrary to what everyone thinks um it is not you know that we should raise the minimum wage necessarily but it's rather a a focus on a different way of thinking about how wages are set um alan and i in our subsequent to that project we in our book we um we spent quite a bit of time discussing the idea that

18:43employers have some discretion in setting wages not necessarily a lot in some cases quite a bit in some cases not much and that idea is now really taken off and almost 30 years later it's taken for that to happen. And so these days, really interesting sets of research are being done using that idea to help enlighten things like black-white wage differences or male-female wage differences. So I think oftentimes we can't see precisely what the ramifications will be of a finding.

19:14And sometimes students get a little discouraged if their results seem to be pretty interesting and no one really cares. and I always tell them, well, you never really know for sure. Sometimes a result will take some time to be fully appreciated. Van Gogh never sold any paintings in his life, so you know, if you want to take that as a possible, you know, way to think about your own work. Thank you, David. We have a question from Andrew Keshner from Market Watch. Andrew, would you like to to unmute yourself and ask your question.

19:53Hi, Professor Andrew Keschner, Market Watch. Congratulations to you. A follow up on that other question, but more specific to this political moment right now on Capitol Hill. What do you think lawmakers, policy researchers, advocates, everyone should keep in mind about your research in these ongoing debates on things like, raising the minimum wage, either at the federal level or state level, immigration policies. And so on. And even if it's not conclusions, then approaches to to the issues. Yeah.

20:35Well, I think in the in the area of the minimum wage, there's been just an enormous amount of research in the last 25 years, following the work that that I did with Alan Kruger and not just in the United States, but in other countries. And I think reevaluating that evidence and thinking about it carefully and evaluating the whole thing from a more scientific view, not from an ideological point of view, I think is helpful and could be useful.

21:07but I'm not particularly optimistic that views on topics like the minimum wage or immigration, the simple kinds of things that economists bring to the table and the kinds of knowledge that we can bring are not necessarily the whole story. You know, fundamentally, if minimum wages go up, even if there's no employment effect, it's still the case that employers have lower profits. and so employers may say well we need our profits so uh you know there's fundamental trade-off between workers wages and employers profits and that isn't really something an economist can uh we can say what the trade-off is but we can't really say which way you should come down in that trade-offs.

21:55David, I have another question for you. So in economics, like many fields is constantly evolving. How do you see the field of economics evolving in the years ahead? And where should today's students and early career faculty try to push the field? Well, the field is becoming much more empirical. When I was a graduate student, I would say seven-eighths of the coursework and the concentration was on theoretical ideas and methodologies. And these days, most of the active research is on the applied side. And that's been made possible by things like the availability of massive, sometimes virtually the entire universe of data for a given topic. Like you can now get access to the tax records for all the workers in many countries. It allows you to follow workers as they move between jobs and allows you to

22:56address questions that were really inconceivable 20 years ago even. And so definitely there's going to be more empirical work. Related to that is this one can see very easily. If one looks at what people are doing, the rise in large team projects that often involve many, many researchers over many, many hours with the teams of undergraduates and graduates as assistants and then assistant professors and maybe some full professors, much more like you would see in a large science lab where there's a long stream of effort required to get a project going and then it requires requires many, many bodies. So that's happening in economics and it means that people have to carefully think about what team they want to join, how they're going to develop experience in many different aspects of the field, maybe move between teams. Much more the kind of careers

23:57I think that you see in the natural sciences. Kind of a related question from a different colleague of mine. Why did your colleagues in the 1990s uh find your work questionable and how has the field kind of evolved to uh to understand it a little bit better well um Economics, historically, was an introspective field. So someone would develop a set of hypotheses from introspection about the way that things worked. And it's oftentimes when people are developing introspective models of the world, they get mistaken between what they, you know, what could be true and what they wish was true or what they think should be true.

24:51And so it often inadvertently starts, their theorizing starts to pick up kind of a, one could think of it as an ideological bias, which comes about from the set of particular simplifications they want to make for their theory versus another theory. And anyway, the reigning theory of the way labor markets worked up until fairly recently, and to some extent even today, says that a given employer has no discretion in what wage they set. Each individual worker essentially faces a market wage.

25:36And the employer simply says, oh, I want to hire that person. I'll pay them this wage. That's they require in the market i want to hire that person that's what they'll pay now in other fields of economics for instance the field of economics that studies um pricing of gasoline or pricing of groceries, they no longer think like that. They haven't thought like that for 30 years. But the labor economists, being kind of a conservative bent, a small c conservative bent, wanted to stick with kind of what you might think of as 1920s thinking in a way. And so our results really make a lot of sense. My findings on the minimum wage, for instance, and to some extent also on immigration, make much more sense in this world where employers have a lot of discretion in what wage they set.

26:19they don't make much sense in this old-fashioned view. And so the reluctance of people to give up on that old-fashioned view really said that, well, as an old friend of mine said, my first co-author was a person named John Aboud, who's now the chief economist at the Census Bureau. And John once said at the end of a seminar, well, once again, the theory has tested the data and found the data wanting. So they were thinking about it along those lines. Professor Card, was this ever a prize that you imagine you'd receive and now that you have it what do you do for an encore uh no i i i would i i don't think um Normally, the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics is awarded for methodological innovations, at least in the past.

27:18And so someone like me who really doesn't do pure methodological research but does substandard research would not normally be someone that would be even any presumption that that kind of work would be something that the field would recognize. with the Nobel Prize. Um, um, I suppose I've got quite a few papers that are overdue.

27:48I have a table I've been working on the last couple of nights and I'll be working on that table probably as soon as I get some sleep. Thank you. Kara, any other questions? No other questions at the moment. Okay, having said that then why don't we, for the next couple of minutes at least, Please, Professor Card, if there are any sort of closing statements or comments that you'd like to make, that would be fantastic. I leave the floor to you. Well, as I said at the beginning, I'd like to, again, reiterate that, you know, my, to the extent that my career has been successful, it's really building on the contributions of so many people, starting with my wife, who's been tolerant of long hours and many absences and many forgotten events on my part.

28:49all of my teachers and also all of my colleagues and co-authors and graduate students who've really been a source of inspiration to me. So I guess I would end with thanking them all for all the great help that they've provided me over the years. All right, thank you. Well, on behalf of Chancellor Carol Christ, Dean of Social Sciences Rocca Ray, chair of department of economics sakar kareev my colleague karaminky and of course our honoree david card i am rokay montez and i thank you all for being with us uh this morning and once again david card congratulations to you thanks for being with us thank you

Source and licence

Recording: File:David Card Nobel Prize press conference.webm by University of California, Berkeley (2021-10-11), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 3.0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.