David Card

David Card
Born	David Edward Card 1956
Birthplace	Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Nationality	Canadian-American
Occupation	Economist, academic
Title	Class of 1950 Professor Emeritus of Economics
Employer	University of California, Berkeley
Known for	Empirical contributions to labour economics, natural experiments in economics, minimum wage research
Education	Princeton University (MA, PhD) Queen's University at Kingston (BA)
Awards	Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2021), BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, John Bates Clark Medal (1995)
Website	[http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/index.html Official site]

David Edward Card (born 1956) is a Canadian-American labour economist who has shaped the empirical study of labour markets through pioneering use of natural experiments. Born in Guelph, Ontario, Card built a career that challenged long-held assumptions in economics, particularly regarding the effects of minimum wage increases, immigration, and education on wages and employment. He has spent the majority of his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the title of Class of 1950 Professor Emeritus of Economics and Professor of the Graduate School. In 2021, Card was awarded half of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirical contributions to labour economics," with the other half shared jointly by Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships. His work, particularly his landmark studies on the minimum wage conducted with the late Alan Krueger, fundamentally altered the academic and policy debate surrounding labour market regulation and demonstrated that empirical evidence could overturn established theoretical predictions. Card is widely regarded as one of the central figures in the so-called "credibility revolution" in empirical economics, a movement that transformed the standards of evidence required to make causal claims in the social sciences and that has had lasting influence on how economists approach policy-relevant research questions.

Early Life

David Edward Card was born in 1956 in Guelph, a city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. He grew up in a farming family in the region surrounding Guelph. Details of his early childhood and family background have been discussed in interviews, where Card has noted the rural environment of his upbringing and the practical orientation of his family. His early exposure to farming and the economics of agriculture may have contributed to his later interest in how labour markets function in practice, as distinct from theoretical models.

Card's early education took place in Ontario. He demonstrated strong academic aptitude, which led him to pursue higher education at Queen's University at Kingston, one of Canada's oldest and most established universities. At Queen's, Card studied economics, earning his Bachelor of Arts degree. His undergraduate training provided a foundation in economic theory and quantitative methods that would prove essential to his later empirical research. The intellectual environment at Queen's, combined with his grounding in the practical realities of the agricultural economy he had observed growing up, positioned Card to approach economic questions with a scepticism toward purely abstract theorising and a disposition toward careful measurement of real-world phenomena.

Education

Card completed his undergraduate education at Queen's University at Kingston in Ontario, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He subsequently moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at Princeton University, one of the foremost centres for economics research in the world. At Princeton, Card studied under Orley Ashenfelter, a prominent labour economist who served as his doctoral advisor. Ashenfelter's influence was significant in shaping Card's approach to empirical research in labour economics, particularly the use of quasi-experimental methods to address causal questions. Ashenfelter was himself a pioneer in the use of innovative data and research designs to study labour market questions, and the mentorship he provided gave Card both a methodological toolkit and an intellectual disposition toward prioritising empirical evidence over theoretical elegance.

Card earned both his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in economics from Princeton University. His graduate training at Princeton placed him at the centre of a methodological revolution in economics, where researchers were increasingly seeking credible empirical strategies to test theoretical predictions about labour markets. The intellectual environment at Princeton, combined with Ashenfelter's mentorship, prepared Card for a career focused on rigorous empirical analysis of labour market phenomena. During his time at Princeton, Card was exposed to the work of a generation of economists who were questioning whether the profession's theoretical models accurately described the behaviour of real labour markets, a scepticism that would animate much of his subsequent research programme.

Career

Early Academic Career

After completing his doctoral studies at Princeton, Card began his academic career in the 1980s. He spent time on the faculty at Princeton University and at the University of Chicago before eventually moving to the University of California, Berkeley. During his early career, Card established himself as a meticulous empirical researcher with a particular focus on labour market questions. He published widely in leading economics journals, building a reputation for careful use of data and innovative research designs.

Card's early work examined a range of labour market issues, including the effects of unions on wages, the returns to education, and the determinants of wage inequality. He developed expertise in using natural experiments — situations where policy changes or other events create conditions approximating a controlled experiment — to draw causal inferences about economic relationships. This methodological approach would become a hallmark of his career and would ultimately contribute to his recognition by the Nobel Committee. The application of natural experiments to labour economics was not entirely without precedent, but Card's consistent and disciplined deployment of the technique across a wide variety of substantive questions helped establish it as a credible and widely adopted research strategy. His early collaborations with Ashenfelter and other Princeton colleagues helped lay the groundwork for what would become a broader methodological movement across the social sciences.

During this period, Card also contributed to debates about the structure of wage determination and the extent to which competitive models accurately captured the functioning of labour markets. His empirical findings frequently suggested that labour markets were less perfectly competitive than textbook models assumed, a theme that would recur throughout his career and that would find its clearest expression in his minimum wage research with Alan Krueger.

Minimum Wage Research

Card's most widely known and debated contribution to economics is his empirical research on the effects of minimum wage increases on employment. In collaboration with Alan Krueger, then also at Princeton University, Card conducted a series of studies in the early 1990s that challenged the prevailing consensus among economists that minimum wage increases necessarily lead to job losses.

The most famous of these studies examined the effects of a 1992 increase in New Jersey's minimum wage on employment in fast food restaurants, using neighbouring Pennsylvania (which did not raise its minimum wage) as a control group. This "natural experiment" design allowed Card and Krueger to compare employment trends in similar establishments across the state border. Their findings indicated that the minimum wage increase in New Jersey did not lead to a reduction in employment in fast food restaurants — a result that contradicted the predictions of the standard competitive model of labour markets. The study's research design — exploiting a policy change in one jurisdiction while using an adjacent jurisdiction as a comparison — became a model for subsequent empirical work not only in labour economics but across many fields of applied economics and policy analysis.

Card and Krueger expanded on this research in their influential 1995 book, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, which presented a comprehensive assessment of the evidence on minimum wage effects. The book challenged what had been a near-consensus position in the economics profession and provoked extensive debate. Some economists criticized the methodology and findings, arguing that the comparison between New Jersey and Pennsylvania was not as clean as Card and Krueger suggested, or that the data collected through telephone surveys introduced measurement error. Others viewed the work as a paradigm shift in the study of labour market regulation, and subsequent empirical studies using other data sources and methods have generally supported the conclusion that moderate minimum wage increases do not lead to significant employment losses.

The minimum wage research conducted by Card and Krueger had significant implications for economic policy. As economist Paul Krugman noted in a 2015 column in The New York Times, the work by Card and Krueger was instrumental in reshaping the debate among economists and policymakers about the effects of minimum wage increases. The research demonstrated that the relationship between minimum wages and employment was more complex than simple theoretical models suggested, and that empirical evidence should take precedence over theoretical assumptions in policy debates. The theoretical mechanism that Card and Krueger's findings pointed toward — that employers in low-wage labour markets may have monopsony power, allowing them to pay workers less than their marginal product — has since become a significant area of research in labour economics, with important implications for how economists and policymakers think about wage-setting and labour market regulation more broadly.

The significance of this body of work was underscored by its central role in the Nobel Committee's citation when awarding Card the 2021 prize. The Committee highlighted Card's minimum wage studies as a key example of how natural experiments could be used to answer important economic questions that are difficult to address through other means.

Immigration Research

Another major area of Card's research concerns the labour market effects of immigration. In a highly influential study, Card examined the impact of the Mariel boatlift of 1980, in which approximately 125,000 Cuban immigrants arrived in Miami over a short period. Using Miami as a natural experiment and comparing its labour market outcomes to those of other cities that did not experience the sudden influx, Card found that the large wave of immigration had virtually no effect on wages or employment prospects for native workers in Miami, including those with low levels of education.

This finding was striking because it contradicted the common assumption that large-scale immigration depresses wages for native-born workers, particularly those competing for low-skilled jobs. Card's Mariel boatlift study became one of the most cited and debated papers in the economics of immigration. While some subsequent researchers challenged aspects of the methodology and findings — most notably George Borjas, who argued that a more carefully selected comparison group revealed wage losses for the least-educated workers — the study remains a foundational contribution to the empirical literature on immigration and labour markets. The debate between Card and Borjas over the interpretation of the Mariel boatlift data became one of the most prominent methodological controversies in empirical economics in recent decades, illustrating both the potential and the limitations of natural experiments as tools for causal inference.

Card's immigration research extended beyond the Mariel boatlift study. He conducted additional analyses of how immigration affects local labour markets, consistently finding that the negative effects on native workers' wages and employment were smaller than theoretical models predicted. He also examined the longer-run effects of immigration on the occupational structure of local labour markets, finding evidence that native workers tend to adjust by moving into higher-skilled occupations when immigrant labour increases the supply of workers in lower-skilled roles. This body of work has had a substantial influence on policy discussions about immigration in the United States and internationally, providing rigorous empirical grounding for debates that are often conducted in the absence of reliable evidence.

Research on Education and Wage Inequality

Card has also made significant contributions to the study of the returns to education and the determinants of wage inequality. His research in this area has employed natural experiments and instrumental variables techniques to estimate the causal effect of schooling on earnings, addressing the well-known problem that individuals who obtain more education may differ in unobservable ways from those who do not. This endogeneity problem had long complicated efforts to estimate the true causal return to an additional year of schooling, and Card's methodological innovations helped produce more credible estimates than had previously been available.

In various studies, Card has examined how differences in access to schooling — resulting from variations in school quality, proximity to colleges, and changes in compulsory schooling laws — affect educational attainment and subsequent labour market outcomes. His findings have generally supported the conclusion that the returns to education are substantial, and that policies expanding access to education can have meaningful effects on earnings and inequality. Notably, Card found evidence that the returns to education for individuals at the margin of attending college — those who would not attend without some facilitation — may be at least as high as, and possibly higher than, the average returns estimated from observational data. This finding has important implications for educational policy, suggesting that expanding access to higher education for disadvantaged populations can yield significant economic benefits.

Card's work on wage inequality has also addressed the roles of institutions, particularly labour unions, in shaping the distribution of wages. His research has documented how declining unionization rates have contributed to rising wage inequality in the United States and other countries, providing empirical evidence on a question of considerable policy importance. By carefully estimating the union wage premium and its distribution across the earnings distribution, Card demonstrated that unions compress wage inequality not only directly, by raising wages at the bottom, but also indirectly, by establishing wage norms that influence pay in non-unionized sectors.

Gender Gaps in Labour Markets

In more recent work, Card has continued to investigate the sources of labour market inequality, including the gender pay gap. A 2025 working paper co-authored by Card and published through the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) examined the role of firms in explaining gender differences in career wage trajectories. The study found that idiosyncratic firm effects account for approximately 20 percent of the variation in early career wage growth, and that the sorting of women to slower-growth firms explains a meaningful portion of the gender gap in career trajectories. This line of research extends Card's long-standing interest in understanding the sources of labour market disparities through rigorous empirical analysis. The finding that firm-level characteristics — rather than individual worker characteristics alone — play a significant role in generating and perpetuating the gender pay gap has implications for how researchers model labour market inequality and for the kinds of policy interventions that might be most effective in addressing it. By situating the gender gap in career trajectories within the broader framework of employer-employee matched data, this research connects Card's ongoing work to an important strand of modern labour economics concerned with the role of firms as active agents in the determination of wages and career outcomes.

At the University of California, Berkeley

Card joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1997, where he became the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics. At Berkeley, he has served as the director of the Center for Labor Economics (CLE), a research centre dedicated to the study of labour market issues. He subsequently became Professor of the Graduate School and Class of 1950 Professor Emeritus at Berkeley. Berkeley's Department of Economics has been one of the leading centres for labour economics research in the United States, and Card's presence there has reinforced the department's reputation as a destination for scholars interested in applied microeconomics and empirical policy analysis.

Throughout his time at Berkeley, Card has been a prolific researcher and an influential mentor to graduate students. He has maintained an active research programme spanning multiple areas of labour economics, and he has served as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His work has been published in the leading economics journals, and he has consistently ranked among the most cited economists in the world, as reflected in his Google Scholar profile. The breadth of Card's research programme at Berkeley — spanning minimum wages, immigration, education, unions, wage inequality, and the gender pay gap — reflects a sustained commitment to using the most rigorous available methods to address questions of direct relevance to workers and to public policy. His productivity and influence during his tenure at Berkeley have made him one of the most consequential economists of his generation.

Consulting and Expert Work

In addition to his academic research, Card has engaged in consulting work related to labour economics, employment, and higher education. In an interview with Cornerstone Research, Card discussed his work on quantifying complexity in labour, employment, and higher education, including evaluating higher education admissions processes and the potential applications of artificial intelligence to labour economics research. In that interview, Card reflected on the ways in which large administrative datasets and modern machine learning tools are changing the landscape of empirical labour economics, while also cautioning that the fundamental challenge of establishing causal relationships — rather than merely identifying correlations — remains as important as ever. His engagement with expert consulting work demonstrates the practical relevance of his research methods to legal and policy contexts where rigorous empirical analysis of labour market outcomes is required.

Public Lectures and Visiting Appointments

Following his Nobel Prize, Card has been in demand as a public lecturer and visiting speaker at universities and research institutions worldwide. In 2025, he delivered the Sandmo Lecture on Public Policy at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen, Norway. The Sandmo Lecture, named in honour of the distinguished Norwegian economist Agnar Sandmo, is one of the most prominent public policy lectures in Scandinavian economics, and Card's selection as the 2025 lecturer reflected his standing in the international economics community. He also presented the 2025 Gamble Memorial Lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. These engagements have allowed Card to present his ongoing research and discuss the broader implications of empirical methods in economics with diverse audiences. His willingness to engage with students and researchers at institutions beyond Berkeley reflects a commitment to the dissemination of rigorous empirical approaches to economics and to the broader public understanding of how labour markets function.

Personal Life

Card was born and raised in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and later became a naturalized citizen of the United States, holding dual Canadian-American citizenship. He has maintained his connection to Canada throughout his career, and his Canadian origins have been noted in profiles and honours from Canadian institutions. Beyond these publicly documented facts, Card has maintained a relatively private personal life, and limited information about his family is available in public sources. He has, however, spoken in interviews about the influence of his rural Ontario upbringing on his perspective as an economist, noting that growing up in an agricultural community gave him an early appreciation for the ways in which labour markets shape the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people — a perspective that has informed the substantive focus of his research throughout his career.

Recognition

David Card's contributions to economics have been recognized with numerous awards and honours over the course of his career.

In 1995, Card received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association to an American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. The Clark Medal is one of the most prestigious awards in the economics profession, and its award to Card in 1995 recognized his early contributions to empirical labour economics, including his work with Alan Krueger on the minimum wage and his research on immigration and the returns to education.

Card was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the economics, finance, and management category, recognizing his contributions to the empirical analysis of labour market policies. The BBVA Foundation award is an internationally recognised prize that honours contributions to areas of knowledge with significant implications for society, and its award to Card acknowledged the broader impact of his empirical research on policy and on the understanding of labour market inequality.

The crowning recognition of Card's career came in October 2021, when he was awarded half of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited his "empirical contributions to labour economics," highlighting his research on the effects of minimum wages, immigration, and education on the labour market. The other half of the prize was awarded jointly to Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships. Card's Nobel Prize recognized not only his specific empirical findings but also his broader contribution to establishing the use of natural experiments as a standard tool in empirical economics. The award was widely seen as a recognition of the entire programme of research associated with the credibility revolution in empirical economics, and Card was acknowledged as one of the leading figures in that transformation of the discipline.

In 2025, Concordia University in Montreal recognized Card with an honorary doctorate, further acknowledging his contributions to economics and his Canadian heritage. The honour from Concordia, a major Canadian university, underscored the pride that Canadian academic institutions have taken in Card's achievements and in his continued identification with his country of origin.

Card has also been honoured by the CESifo Research Network, where he has participated as a lecturer and contributor to the organization's Labour Economics Area. The ifo Institut has noted that Card was the lecturer at CESifo's first Labour Webinar for the then-newly created CESifo Research Network's Labour Economics Area, marking his long association with the network and its mission of promoting rigorous economic research.

Legacy

David Card's influence on economics extends well beyond his individual research findings. His work, along with that of his collaborators, played a central role in what has been described as the "credibility revolution" in empirical economics — a movement toward research designs that provide more convincing evidence of causal relationships. By demonstrating that natural experiments could yield reliable answers to important policy questions, Card helped establish a new standard for empirical research in the social sciences. This transformation in the methods and standards of empirical economics has had far-reaching consequences not only for labour economics but for applied microeconomics more broadly, influencing how researchers approach questions in health economics, public finance, development economics, and many other fields.

The minimum wage research conducted with Alan Krueger stands as one of the most consequential contributions to economic policy analysis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Before their work, there was a strong consensus among economists that minimum wage increases reduced employment. Card and Krueger's findings challenged this consensus and opened the door to a more nuanced understanding of how labour markets respond to wage floors. Their work influenced policy debates in the United States and around the world, contributing to a shift in political and scholarly attitudes toward minimum wage legislation. The empirical evidence accumulated in the decades since Card and Krueger's original studies has on balance supported their conclusion that moderate minimum wage increases do not generate the large employment losses predicted by simple competitive models, and this evidence base has informed minimum wage legislation in numerous jurisdictions.

Card's immigration research has similarly had a lasting impact. His Mariel boatlift study remains a touchstone in debates about immigration policy, and his broader body of work on the labour market effects of immigration has provided essential empirical evidence for policymakers and scholars. In an era of heightened political controversy over immigration in many countries, the availability of rigorous empirical evidence on the labour market consequences of immigration — of the kind that Card has produced — is of particular importance for ensuring that policy debates are grounded in evidence rather than assumption.

As a mentor and educator at the University of California, Berkeley, Card has trained a generation of labour economists who have gone on to make their own contributions to the field. The Center for Labor Economics at Berkeley, which he directed, has served as an important hub for labour economics research, bringing together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty with a shared commitment to rigorous empirical analysis of labour market questions. The intellectual culture that Card has helped foster at Berkeley — one that prizes careful identification strategies, transparent data analysis, and engagement with policy-relevant questions — has influenced labour economics research well beyond the boundaries of the institution.

Card's ongoing research, including his recent work on the gender pay gap and the role of firms in shaping career trajectories, demonstrates a continued commitment to using rigorous empirical methods to address questions of economic and social importance. His career exemplifies the value of careful, evidence-based economic research in informing public policy and advancing understanding of how labour markets function. As Card himself has suggested in recent interviews and public lectures, the future of empirical labour economics lies in the combination of new data sources — including large administrative datasets and digital records of employment — with the methodological rigour that the credibility revolution established, and in the thoughtful application of emerging tools such as artificial intelligence to the longstanding challenge of understanding the causes and consequences of labour market inequality.