Brittany and Michael conclude Pioneers in Instrumental Variables series

Guido Imbens once told me that he was inspired to become an econometrician because as a high school student, he read a book about another Dutch economist, Jan Tinbergen. It must therefore have been quite an interesting turn of events that Imbens would one day win the Nobel Prize in economics for a topic that Tinbergen, who had also won the award, had himself contributed to, instrumental variables. I shared in a previous entry how he and Angrist had together worked to construct a new understanding of instrumental variables in their LATE theorem. I’d like to now simply share some personal thoughts I’ve had brewing about Imbens for a while.

I first met Guido Imbens at a restaurant bar at the ASSA where me and a handful friends were watching Georgia play Alabama in the 2018 NCAA championship game. He and Susan Athey were teaching a continuing education class then and I wrote to see if they would like to come and watch it. I’d never met either of them, so it was a fun surprise that he ac…