Nobel Prize winner Guido Imbens receives honorary doctorate from Erasmus University

Professor Guido Imbens will receive an honorary doctorate from Erasmus University next year. The conferral will take place during the 110th Anniversary Day on 8 November 2023. The professor of Econometrics at Stanford University won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2021.

Imbens won the Nobel Prize together with David Card and Joshua Angrist, for their Local Average Treatment Effect model. This method is still used to analyse causal relationships, such as the effect of higher teaching salaries on children’s learning performance or the effectiveness of a new drug on a patient.

Imbens’ roots lie partly on the Woudestein campus. He studied Econometrics here in the 1980s, but did not complete his degree, as he was already able to do his Master’s degree during an exchange in England, after which he left for America.

Imbens has published extensively in leading economic journals, as well as leading journals for other disciplines such as biology and statistics. In 2021, he became the third Dutch winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Jan Tinbergen was the first Dutch person to win the prize in 1969, together with the Norwegian Ragnar Frisch. In 1975, Tjalling Koopmans shared it with the Russian Leonid Kantorovich.