Guido Imbens accepts honorary doctorate by Erasmus University Rotterdam; to be presented in autumn 2023

Imbens’ great academic achievements are exemplified by his impressive list of publications. While most of his publications have appeared in top-5 economics journals, he also published in other leading journals outside the field of economics, like in biology and statistics.

Effect of policy on the economy

Guido Imbens has conducted influential work to help address the limitations of real-world experiments of social scientists, greatly improving researchers’ ability to assess the effects of interventions from both field and experimental data. His work is used to analyse complicated research questions such as the effectiveness of a new drug on a patient or the impacts of new regulation on economic activity. His research provides a conceptual lens through which researchers across the social sciences interpret data. The tools for causal inferences he and his colleagues have developed have helped to ignite an empirical revolution in the social sciences. Imbens has also researched artificial intelligence and machine learning, collaborating with researchers from Facebook and Amazon.

Nobel Prize laureate

In 2021, Guido Imbens, along with David Card (University of California) and Joshua Angrist (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), was presented the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He received the prize for his methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.

Imbens, who was appointed as foreign member to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 2017, was born in Geldrop and studied econometrics at Erasmus School of Economics. He then continued his career in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Imbens is the third Dutch winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Jan Tinbergen was the first to win this prize in 1969 along with the Norwegian Ragnar Frisch. In 1975, Tjalling Koopmans shared it with the Russian Leonid Kantorovitsj.