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The Nobel prize in economics celebrates an empirical revolution
诺贝尔经济学奖表彰实证革命
David Card shares this year’s award with Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens
大卫·卡德与约书亚·安格里斯特和吉多·因本斯共享今年的诺奖
- empirical 以实验（或经验）为依据的、经验主义的（参见：小词详解 | empirical）
A “credibility revolution” has transformed economics since the 1990s. Before that, theory ruled the roost and empirical work was a poor second cousin. “Hardly anyone takes data analysis seriously,” declared Edward Leamer of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a paper published in 1983. Yet within a decade, new and innovative work had altered the course of the profession, such that the lion’s share of notable research today is empirical. For enabling this transition David Card of the University of California at Berkeley shares this year’s economics Nobel prize, awarded on October 11th, with Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens of Stanford University.
自上世纪90年代以来，“可信度革命”已经改变了经济学。在此之前，理论研究占据主导地位，而实证研究只是个小配角。“没什么人把数据分析当回事。”加州大学洛杉矶分校的爱德华·利默（Edward Leamer）在1983年发表的一篇论文中写道。然而，在此后十年里，新的创新性研究改变了这个行业的进程，如今大部分受关注的研究都是实证性的。加州大学伯克利分校的大卫·卡德（David Card）因为在推动这一转变上的成就，于10月11日同麻省理工学院的约书亚·安格里斯特（Joshua Angrist）和斯坦福大学的吉多·因本斯（Guido Imbens）一道获颁诺贝尔经济学奖。
The messy real world can often defy economists’ attempts to establish causality. Working out how a rise in the minimum wage affects employment, for example, is complicated by the fact that some other influence (a chronically weak labour market, say) may have contributed to changes in both policy and employment. In other fields researchers establish causation by designing experiments where subjects are randomly assigned to different groups, only one of which receives a particular treatment, so that the effect of the treatment can be clearly seen. More economists are also using randomised controlled trials—indeed, the Nobel prize in 2019 rewarded such efforts. But many questions cannot be studied this way for reasons of politics, logistics or ethics.
错综复杂的现实世界往往让经济学家难以确立因果关系。例如，要弄清楚最低工资上涨对就业的影响就很困难，因为其他一些因素（比如长期疲软的劳动力市场）也可能导致政策和就业变化，从而让问题变得复杂。在其他领域，研究人员通过设计实验来确立因果关系，将受试者随机分组，其中只有一组能接受某种待遇，以便可以清楚地看到这种待遇的效果。越来越多的经济学家也在使用随机对照试验——事实上，2019年的诺贝尔奖表彰的就是这种尝试。但由于政治、实验安排组织或伦理方面的原因，许多问题无法做这样的研究。
- defy 指“违抗、反抗、对抗”以及“蔑视、藐视”（参见：小词详解 | defy）
- causality 因果关系；因果律（或性）
- chronically 慢性地、长期地
This year’s prizewinners surmounted such hurdles by using “natural experiments”, in which some quirk of history has an effect similar to an intentional trial. In a landmark paper published in 1994, Mr Card and Alan Krueger studied the impact of a minimum-wage increase in New Jersey by comparing the change in employment there with that in neighbouring Pennsylvania, where the wage floor was unchanged. Although theory predicted that a minimum-wage rise would be followed by a sharp drop in employment, such an effect, strikingly, did not seem to hold in practice. The paper inspired further empirical work and injected new energy into thinking about labour markets. Krueger, who died in 2019, would probably have shared the prize had he lived.
今年的诺奖得主通过“自然实验”克服了这些障碍，即认为历史上一些偶发特殊事件的作用类似于专门设计的试验。在1994年发表的一篇具里程碑意义的论文中，卡德和艾伦·克鲁格（Alan Krueger）比较了提高了最低工资的新泽西州和没有调整最低工资的邻州宾夕法尼亚的就业变化，以研究提高最低工资对新泽西州的影响。尽管理论预测最低工资上涨会导致就业水平急剧下降，但令人意外的是，在实践中似乎并没有这种效果。这篇论文激发了进一步的实证研究，并为有关劳动力市场的见解注入了新的活力。克鲁格于2019年逝世，如果他还健在，很可能会共享今年的经济学奖。
- surmount 克服、解决；处于（某物）上面、置于（某物）顶端
- quirk 怪异的性格（或行为），怪癖；（尤指偶发的）怪事，奇事
- hurdle 喻指“障碍、困难、难关”，多指在取得进步之前必须解决或处理的问题或困难（参见：小词详解 | hurdle）
