Prof. Josh Angrist

Prof. Joshua Angrist (Ph.D., Princeton University) is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a director of MIT's School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He taught at Harvard and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before coming to MIT in 1996. He is the author (with Steve Pischke) of Mostly Harmless Economics: An Empiricist's Companion (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Mastering 'Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect (Princeton University Press, 2015).

 

Your CV contains a number of publications on the role of data in policy debates. Do you tend to be hopeful or despairing when it comes to policy makers paying attention to empirical/statistical studies produced by economists?    

Hope springs eternal in my empirical breast.

Do your students have more trouble with the mathematical side of generating data or with the process of writing up their results and communicating them clearly and effectively? 

My graduate students know a lot of math, probably so much that it inhibits thought. But yes indeed they struggle to write a coherent paragraph. Too bad, since scholars like those they aspire to be write for a living.