David Card is the esteemed Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has established himself as a preeminent figure in labor economics for over three decades. Born in Guelph, Canada in 1956, he earned his B.A. from Queen's University in 1978 and completed his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1983, laying the foundation for his distinguished academic career. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, he taught at Princeton University from 1983 to 1996, establishing his reputation through rigorous empirical research on labor market phenomena. As Founding Director of Berkeley's Center for Labor Economics from 1997 to 2022 and former Director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 2008 to 2017, he has shaped institutional frameworks for advancing economic research.
Card's groundbreaking research fundamentally challenged long-held economic assumptions, most notably through his innovative empirical approach to studying labor market dynamics. His seminal 1993 study with Alan Krueger analyzing New Jersey's minimum wage increase demonstrated that raising minimum wages does not necessarily reduce employment, contradicting conventional economic wisdom and sparking a paradigm shift in labor economics. Extending this methodological innovation, his research on immigration revealed that increased immigrant populations do not significantly depress wages for native-born workers, reshaping policy debates worldwide. Through his influential book Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage and over 100 scholarly publications, he established natural experiments as a cornerstone of empirical economic research, transforming how economists investigate causal relationships in complex social systems.
As the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, sharing half the award for his empirical contributions to labor economics, Card's influence extends far beyond academic circles into policy formulation and public discourse on economic justice. His receipt of the prestigious John Bates Clark Prize in 1995 and the Frisch Medal, along with his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021, underscores his exceptional scholarly impact across decades of rigorous inquiry. Serving as President of the American Economic Association in 2021, he continues to guide the profession's intellectual direction while mentoring the next generation of economists committed to evidence-based policy analysis. Card's legacy endures through his transformative methodological contributions that have empowered economists to extract reliable causal insights from observational data, ensuring his work will continue to inform economic understanding and policy decisions for generations to come.
