Nobel Prize-winning economist David Card to NHH
One of the world’s most influential labor economists, Berkeley Professor David Card, will deliver the Sandmo Lecture on Public Policy at NHH.
David Card
Using natural experiments, David Card has analysed the labour market effects of minimum wages, immigration and education. His studies from the early 1990s challenged conventional wisdom, leading to new analyses and additional insights. The results showed, among other things, that increasing the minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs. We now know that the incomes of people who were born in a country can benefit from new immigration, while people who immigrated at an earlier time risk being negatively affected. We have also realised that resources in schools are far more important for students’ future labour market success than was previously thought (Source: The Nobel Prize, 2021).
The Sandmo Lecture is held annually in honour of Professor Agnar Sandmo (1938–2019), one of Norway’s foremost economists and an internationally recognised scholars. Each year, the Department of Economics invites a leading international economist to contribute to public debate and advance understanding of key economic issues.
This year’s guest could hardly be more prominent:
`David Card’s groundbreaking work has revolutionized labor economics and empirical research far beyond his field´, says Kjell Gunnar Salvanes. He is a Professor at the Department of Economics and Deputy Director of FAIR.
Political polarization in the U.S
David Card, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, was awarded half of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2021.
At NHH, Card will deliver a lecture titled The Role of Firms in the Labour Market: Where Are We Now?
With his visit to NHH, David Card brings not only groundbreaking insights into labor markets, but also a clear concern for the growing challenges facing universities in the US. After the talk, he will address this, also in the Q&A session with the NHH students.
threats to academic freedom
`Regarding the political pressures on universities in the US. What do you see as the greatest risks to academic freedom today?´
`I think the denigration of scientific knowledge and the value of research is extremely serious. The administration is threatening to destroy an infrastructure that took many decades to build and that has delivered huge benefits to the US , including amazing progress in medicine, genetics, and computer science. In my opinion the US dominance in tech reflects this infrastructure´, Professor Card says, and adds:
`So the threats to academic freedom are just one part of this bigger agenda to reduce the importance of open inquiry and scientific knowledge and replace it with a deeply ideological and essentially "religious" narrative that can be controlled´.
Wage inequality
David Card's research on minimum wages, immigration, and education challenged long-standing assumptions in economics and provided fresh, empirical insights that have transformed policy discussions worldwide.
`Especially wage inequality – what determines how much one person earns compared to another – is one of the topics David Card has studied most extensively´, says Salvanes.
Card points to education, gender, ethnicity, and geography as key drivers, along with more intangible factors such as mathematical ability, ambition, and work ethic, which are much harder to measure.
`Today, his methods and findings continue to shape research in fields ranging from education to health economics´, says Salvanes.