Avela Founder Joshua Angrist Wins Nobel Prize
The 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences honored the work of Joshua Angrist, David Card, and Guido Imbens, which changed the way that labor markets are studied.
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Avela Founders
Greg, Josh, and Parag
Avela Founder Joshua Angrist Wins Nobel Prize
Angrist is honored alongside David Card and Guido Imbens for his research on causal relationships in education and labor.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today at the National Academy of Sciences, Ambassador Karin Olofsdotter presented the Nobel Prize medal to Avela Co-Founder Dr. Joshua D. Angrist, a winner of the 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Angrist shares the award with co-author Guido Imbens of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and with one of his PhD advisors, David Card of the University of California at Berkeley.
The Nobel Committee cited Angrist's research on natural experiments that have "substantially improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which has been of great benefit to society." Angrist has looked into casual questions in labor economics, such as the effect of serving in the military on lifetime earnings, and in education, such as the effects of charter school attendance.
Angrist is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Avela, an education software company that helps schools, districts, and nonprofits manage admission and enrollment decisions. Angrist founded Avela with his MIT colleague, Dr. Parag Pathak, and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Greg Bybee.
"I love working with Avela clients," Angrist shared. "We've already launched the best school finder and student enrollment platform to help students, teachers, and schools find their best matches. It's gratifying to see our research have a real-world impact."
Angrist is also the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, where he is a Co-Director of the MIT Blueprint Labs (formerly the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative). There, he leads research on student assignment algorithms and value added measures in education.
Over the last two decades, Angrist and Pathak have partnered with school districts around the country, including New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Denver, to analyze enrollment data and design matching mechanisms to better assign students to schools. Through this work, they identified a market gap in available tools to help run the matching algorithms and were inspired to found Avela.
Avela recently launched Avela Match™, a matchmaking platform used to assign people to opportunities, such as students into schools, volunteers to projects, or military officers to branches. Avela Match implements many of the assignment algorithms designed by Angrist and Pathak, but makes them easy to use with a drag-and-drop interface.
"Avela has been able to accelerate adoption of research-based best practices that our lab studies," Angrist said. "We're helping to close the gap between academia and industry by providing software tools directly to practitioners that implement the latest research."
Angrist is also fond of teaching students. He has received several teaching awards, including the Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellowship and both the MIT Economics Department Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching Awards. He created an online ecosystem for anyone in the world to learn econometrics, including a free course, Mastering Econometrics, at MRU.org.
He also co-authored two renowned econometrics textbooks with Jörn-Steffen Pischke, Mastering 'Metrics and Mostly Harmless Econometrics, the latter which earned the Second Fama Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Doctoral Education.
On Wednesday, Angrist will deliver a public lecture on "Empirical Strategies in Economics: Illuminating the Path from Cause to Effect." The lecture can be watched on nobelprize.org on December 8 at 7:00 AM ET.
About Avela
Avela gives enrollment, admission, and award officers the tools to make equitable decisions and empower families. Avela's enrollment suite supports each stage of the admission journey with a focus on equity, accessibility, and ease of use. Avela is proud to work with leading education nonprofits, school districts, and universities to promote equity in access to education. Learn more at https://avela.org.
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Get To Know Josh
Joshua Angrist is the Chief Scientist and Co-Founder at Avela Education, which is focused on advancing equity in education using market design. Angrist is also the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, where he leads MIT’s Blueprint Labs, a research lab focused on market design in education and healthcare. In 2021, Angrist won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on labor economics and casual inference.
A dual U.S. and Israeli citizen, he taught at Harvard and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before coming to MIT in 1996. Angrist received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1982 and completed his Ph.D. in Economics at Princeton in 1989. Angrist is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Angrist’s research interests include the economics of education and school reform; social programs and the labor market; the effects of immigration, labor market regulation and institutions; and econometric methods for program and policy evaluation.
Angrist is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has served on many editorial boards and as a Co-editor of the Journal of Labor Economics. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Gallen (Switzerland) in 2007 and is the author (with Steve Pischke) of Mostly Harmless Economics: An Empiricist’s Companion and Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect, both published by Princeton University Press. Angrist and Pischke hope to bring undergraduate econometrics instruction out of the Stones Age.