Canadian David Card, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics, stands for a portrait in Berkeley, Calif. Card, a professor on the College of California, Berkeley, acquired the award for his analysis on minimal wages and immigration. (AP Picture/Noah Berger)
Utilized economists spend a big fraction of their time making an attempt to squeeze significant solutions — causal results — out of observational knowledge.
Not like the pure sciences, we will’t run experiments with the intention to reply the large questions in our subject. If we need to know, for instance, how elevating the minimal wage impacts unemployment, we should depend on real-world knowledge generated by employers and their staff and clients.
However it’s not as simple as merely evaluating unemployment charges in two jurisdictions with totally different minimal wage insurance policies. Minimal wage laws is a coverage selection, and these decisions are a perform of a variety of financial and political forces that additionally probably clarify unemployment charges. Meaning our means to be taught something in regards to the impact of minimal wage hikes from a easy “apples and oranges” comparability of this nature may be very restricted.
Canadian economist David Card acquired a share of this 12 months’s Nobel prize in economics largely for growing credible strategies for teasing causal results from this kind of observational knowledge.
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Introducing David Card, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics winner who made the minimal wage respectable
Whereas the native of Guelph, Ont., has written too many high-impact papers to say right here, economists typically affiliate his title with two landmark, extremely influential research, which all of us be taught in graduate college.
The primary, which examines the impact of minimal wages on unemployment, has acquired a lot consideration within the wake of the Nobel announcement. So let’s give attention to the second, through which Card mixed a intelligent method with knowledge generated by a novel historic occasion to credibly reply how large-scale immigration from a poor nation impacts the wages of native-born residents.
The Mariel Boatlift
Between April and October of 1980, about 125,000 folks escaped Cuba from the Port of Mariel, touchdown as refugees in Miami. What turned often called the Mariel Boatlift all of a sudden and dramatically elevated Miami’s native labour drive by about seven per cent.
It is a prime instance of a “pure experiment,” which social scientists are a lot better in a position to acknowledge and exploit right now due partially to Card’s trail-blazing early work.
Although it might be unattainable to review the impact of mass immigration on native employment and wages in a real laboratory setting, Card realized that the Mariel Boatlift was the following neatest thing as the town of Miami skilled an sudden main immigration shock for causes that had little, if something, to do with wages or employment locally.
On this 1980 picture, a U.S. Marine helps a younger Cuban baby off a refugee boat in Key West, Fla.
(AP Picture/Fernando Yovera)
The strategy he used is a traditional instance of what has develop into a normal device within the utilized economist’s toolkit, often called “distinction in variations.” By evaluating the distinction in Miami wages from earlier than and after the boatlift to the identical distinction over time in a gaggle of U.S. management cities, Card was in a position to credibly estimate the causal impact of large-scale immigration of low-skill staff within the native labour market.
Card discovered a “null” impact — not solely had been native wages and unemployment unaffected by the seven per cent enhance within the labour drive in Miami, there was particularly no impact on native-born low-skill staff, outlined as these with at most a highschool diploma. These findings had been at odds with a whole lot of anti-immigration sentiment in each the U.S. and Canada.
Testing Economics 101
Card’s discovering challenged the standard knowledge of the time and finally compelled economists to rethink the Economics 101 mannequin of immigration and wage settings within the labour market. Within the dominant considering of the time, mass immigration represents a significant enhance in labour provide, which ought to result in a lower within the value of labour — in different phrases, decrease wages and fewer work for native-born residents.
Why would an enormous inflow of staff to a metropolis fail to claim downward strain on native wages and employment? Greater than 30 years after Card’s paper was revealed, immigration and labour economists are nonetheless reckoning along with his key findings, and an entire new set of theories and empirical research are on the desk.
One idea with some supporting proof is that international staff and native staff may be “imperfect substitutes” in manufacturing. In different phrases, international staff and native staff can concentrate on totally different duties, and a significant inflow of immigrants would possibly trigger native-born staff to reallocate their labour to their comparative benefit.
For instance, native staff have a bonus in jobs that require robust native language abilities, and a part of the explanation the Miami economic system was in a position to soak up the massive inflow of staff so simply is that native-born staff reallocated their labour to jobs that require robust English-language communication abilities.
Folks wave American and Cuban flags as they dance to music on the Calle Ocho Competition, the biggest Hispanic pageant within the U.S. that draws 1000’s to the Little Havana neighbourhood of Miami yearly.
(AP Picture/Wilfredo Lee)
However the case is way from closed on this concern, and a part of Card’s legacy is the continued try to scrupulously perceive the connection between immigration and the labour market.
Card’s profound affect on economics
There’s a good parallel right here with Card’s different landmark paper on the minimal wage. It additionally concerned an early software of the difference-in-differences methodology to a few American states, one which upped its minimal wage and one other that didn’t.
There too, Card discovered a null impact — a modest enhance within the minimal wage had no impact on employee unemployment. This discovering additionally despatched labour economists again to the drafting board, because it successfully refuted the accepted knowledge on the time that government-imposed wage will increase ought to cut back demand for staff and result in increased unemployment. The consequence has been continued cautious examine on how the minimal wage impacts unemployment.
Card sits in his workplace on the College of California, Berkeley.
(AP Picture/Noah Berger)
It’s outstanding that, in a subject that disproportionately rewards the invention of enormous causal results, Card has been acknowledged for serving to revolutionize the observe of utilized economics by writing two papers that confirmed null results.
The impression Card has had on economics is tough to overstate. He’s rightfully thought of one of many engineers of the so-called “credibility revolution” in economics, which has made empirical economics the realm of selection for the overwhelming majority of graduate college students prior to now 20 years.
Each cohort of graduate or upper-year undergraduate college students is taught in regards to the idea of distinction in variations by the lens of Card’s well-known work, and it’s laborious to think about that altering any time quickly.
Arvind Magesan receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Analysis Council (SSHRC)
