The 2021 Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Canadian economist David Card, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, together with Joshua Ingrist and Guido Imbens. Professor David Card received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa on March 24, 2017, at the inaugural conference of the Ottawa-Carleton Graduate School of Economics. He was also one of the keynote speakers at that conference. Professor Card received the Nobel Prize for his many contributions to labour economics.
Testimony of Gilles Grenier, professor emeritus, University of Ottawa
I met David Card when I was a student at Princeton University. He got his Ph.D. in 1983 and I got mine in 1982. We were not in the same class, but we bumped into each other recurrently in Princeton and elsewhere afterwards. As a student, David Card was already recognized as a rising star, someone above the average, so much so that his thesis supervisor would have liked to recruit him straight away as a professor. However, this went against the tradition that a university does not hire its own students, unless they spend time elsewhere before. When he entered the job market, David Card first ended up at the University of Chicago, but the following year, Princeton repatriated him and he remained there until 1997. He then joined the University of California at Berkeley. I had the opportunity to follow David Card's exceptional career and his contributions were regularly on the reading lists of my courses in labour economics. His research crosses several areas, including immigration, minimum wages and returns to education. He is known to exploit the effect of special circumstances and natural experiments to study causal relationships in the labour market. He always had original, one could say brilliant, ideas for examining a given topic. His analyses sometimes called into question a certain orthodoxy of the discipline of economics and led to several debates among economists. David Card is a Canadian who made a career in the United States. He has always remained attached to his origins and much of his research focuses on Canada. Congratulations to David for a great job!