The Local Average Treatment Effect

Episode 7 of Mixtape: the Podcast. I interview Josh Angrist, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics, Ford professor of economics at MIT, and director of the MIT Blueprint Labs. In this interview, we discuss a range of topics such as being bored and aimless as a young man, his time in the Israeli army as a paratrooper, his time at the 1980s Princeton Industrial Labor Relations group, his collaborations with fellow Nobel laureate Guido Imbens and the late Alan Krueger, as well as the econometric contributions he made to our understanding of causal inference and instrumental variables for which the Nobel Committee awarded him the prize. A pioneer in many ways who through his scholarship, mentoring, and proselytizing of causal inference and applied methodology, Josh Angrist is arguably one of the most important figures in empirical microeconomics of the last 50 years and a delightful person to interview.