24 Facts About Joshua Angrist

Joshua David Angrist is an Israeli American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Joshua Angrist is a co-founder and co-director of MIT's Blueprint Labs, which researches the relationship between human capital and income inequality in the US Joshua Angrist cofounded Avela, an ed-tech startup that provides application and enrollment-related software and services to school districts, schools of all kinds, organizations like Teach for America, and the US military.

Joshua Angrist was born to a Jewish family in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1977.

Joshua Angrist lived in Israel from 1982 until 1985 and served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defence Forces.

Joshua Angrist additionally served as the Wesley Clair Mitchell Visiting professor at Columbia University in 2018.

Joshua Angrist is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, the American Economic Association, American Statistical Association, Econometric Society, Population Association of America and the Society of Labor Economists.

Joshua Angrist is a frequent co-author of Guido Imbens, Alan B Krueger, Victor Lavy, Parag Pathak and Jorn-Steffen Pischke.

Together with Pischke, Joshua Angrist published Mostly Harmless Econometrics in 2008, in which they explore econometric tools used by empirical researchers.

The bulk of Joshua Angrist's research has concentrated on the economics of education, beginning with the returns to schooling.

Joshua Angrist has studied the strong decrease in the economic returns to schooling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1980s.

Together with Lavy, Joshua Angrist has explored the returns to schooling in Morocco, exploiting a change in its language of instruction from French to Arabic to find that policy substantially reduced Moroccan youths' returns to schooling by deteriorating their French writing skills.

For instance, in further work with Lavy, Joshua Angrist exploited Maimonides' rule, which limits class size to 40 students, in order to study the impact of class size on scholastic achievement in Israeli schools, finding that class size reduction substantially increase test scores for 4th and 5th graders, albeit not for 3rd graders.

Since the late 2000s, Joshua Angrist has conducted extensive research on charter schools in the US with Pathak, Abdulkadiroglu, Susan Dynarski, Thomas Kane, and Christopher Walters.

Together with Krueger, Joshua Angrist investigated with Krueger whether US World War II veterans earned more than nonveterans, finding instead that they earned at most as much as comparable nonveterans.

Together with Adriana Kugler, Joshua Angrist finds that labor market institutions that reduce labor market flexibility exacerbate native job losses from immigration, especially regarding restricted product markets.

Besides his empirical research, Joshua Angrist has made major contributions to econometrics, especially concerning the use of instrumental variables estimations.

For instance, Joshua Angrist developed a two-stage least squares equivalent of the efficient Wald estimator.

In further work with Imbens and Donald Rubin, Joshua Angrist then showed how instrumental variables can be embedded within the Rubin causal model in order to identify causal effects between variables.

Joshua Angrist developed with Imbens and Krueger so-called "jackknife instrumental variables estimators" to address the bias in 2SLS estimates in over-identified models and has explored the interpretation of IV estimators in simultaneous equations models along with Imbens and Kathryn Graddy.

Finally, along with Victor Chernozhukov and Ivan Fernandez-Val, Joshua Angrist has explored quantile regressions, showing that they minimize a weighted MSE loss function for specification error.

Joshua Angrist is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor.

Joshua Angrist was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.

In 2007 Joshua Angrist received an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of St Gallen.

Joshua Angrist is the recipient of the 2011 John von Neumann Award given annually by the Rajk Laszlo College for Advanced Studies in Budapest.