Born in the Netherlands, economist Guido Imbens recalls that “neither of my parents had completed a university degree.… This was in the fifties when Holland was still rebuilding after the war and studying wasn’t quite as common as it became later.” Despite their own lack of education, Imbens’s parents encouraged his studies, and he decided to pursue econometrics after being introduced to the life and work of Dutch economist Nikolaas Tinbergen by a teacher. Ultimately, he completed his PhD at Brown University in 1991, going on to teach at a number of universities before arriving at Stanford University in 2012, where he is now the applied econometrics professor and professor of economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
In 2021, Imbens was named corecipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work developing methodologies and frameworks to help economists use real-life situations, known as natural experiments, to test theories. Put simply, natural experiments are observational studies that utilize data to infer the impact of a policy, natural phenomena, or other condition on a group in circumstances that would be impossible or unethical to implement in a controlled experiment. His work in econometrics has brought him many accolades, but to Imbens, what he likes most about what he does is “talking with the students and seeing them grow as researchers, and being able to influence them and seeing them kind of develop their own ideas.” The recipient of honorary doctorates from Brown University and the University of St. Gallen, Imbens is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is coauthor of the textbook described as a “definitive treatment of causality,” Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences: An Introduction (2015).
Twitter: @guido_imbens
