Watch UC Berkeley economist David Card’s Nobel Prize press conference

David Card, a labor economist and professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, won the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work that challenged orthodoxy and dramatically shifted understanding of inequality and the social and economic forces that impact low-wage workers. He was awarded half the prize, with the other half shared by economists Joshua Angrist of MIT and Guido Imbens of Stanford University.

Card is best known for pioneering studies in the 1990s that remain acutely relevant today, as they questioned the prevailing assumptions about the impact of immigration on native-born U.S. workers and the effect of minimum wage increases on domestic job growth.

During the press conference, Card’s colleague Shachar Kariv called Card, “intellectually honest,” adding that, “he is tough-minded, but flexible when he needs to be, and he is as ready to give advice on others’ work as he is to accept it on his own.”

Card, 65, a native of Ontario, Canada, is UC Berkeley’s sixth economist to win the Nobel Prize in economics and the campus’s 26th Nobel laureate overall.

• Read more about Card’s work and his reaction to the early morning phone call from the Nobel committee.