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Fridge magnets, econometrics and a Nobel Prize

In the gift shop of the Nobel Prize museum it is possible to purchase kitchen magnets with quotes from famous Nobel Prize winners. There is one from Bob Dylan about staying young forever, one from Marie Curie about being less curious about people and more curious about ideas. Amongst the other fridge magnets, you will also be able to find one from University of Hull graduate Professor Guido Imbens (MSc Economics, 1986): ‘The really challenging thing is asking good questions.’

It’s a quietly understated quote, but as well as suggesting that the questions we ask are as important at the answers we seek, it also points to the understated genius of the contribution for which he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2021 alongside his colleagues Joshua Angrist and David Card. Their work has helped researchers better understand cause-and-effect relationships in real-world economic situations, where it is not possible to set up controlled experiments.

In the video below, we put the questions to Guido when he returned to Hull in July of 2024 to receive an Honorary Degree in recognition of his remarkable achievements and becoming the first ever Nobel Prize recipient in our community.

You can watch our interview or read the highlights below:

There were two things that we wanted to know from Guido on arriving back on campus: how did it feel to receive a Nobel Prize, and how did it feel to be back in Hull to receive an Honorary Degree?

“It’s a very strange, very unreal experience,” Guido said of the moment when he discovered he was to receive a Nobel Prize. “They make the decision around 11 in the morning in Stockholm, and call you at around 2 in the morning in California. I woke up with the telephone call and you have about half-an-hour to get ready because you are going to get lots of calls. You realise it’s going to be a very big change. My wife and I woke up the kids, and they got very excited. It was a very special morning.”

His return to Hull was perhaps more nostalgic, and although he wasn’t able to bring his family on this occasion, it was something that he very much felt he wanted to do when he arrived at the train station and found the memories flooding back from the time he first arrived in Hull by ferry as a student from Rotterdam. Now, he was coming back as a Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School and the recipient of one of the most prestigious awards in the world.

When asked if there was a ‘causal relationship’ between coming to Hull and getting a Nobel Prize, Guido laughed, but admitted that it was only after coming to Hull that he thought about doing a PhD in Economics.

“Yes, there’s definitely a big influence there,” he admitted. “But it also got me thinking very differently about research.”

Professor Guido Imbens was interviewed by David Simpson, Alumni Engagement Manager.

In the 1980s Guido came to Hull as part of an exchange programme with his university in Rotterdam. Thinking it would be as good a place to go as any for a year, he quickly found that the experience in Hull was very different to what he was used to.

“When I came here, I really enjoyed the year. It was much more of a campus University than Rotterdam.”

Guido was invited to stay for an extra year as a Research Assistant before being advised by his supervisor and mentor, the late Tony Lancaster, to pursue postgraduate work in the USA, which he did.

Tony’s influence was very important on Guido’s development in those early days. “He was a very good mentor in terms of letting his students develop their own ideas, but kind of steering them in various directions,” Guido said. “That got me very interested in doing research.

”That early interest that found its spark here in Hull went on to develop into work that supported the research efforts of others.

“The methods that I developed together with Josh Angrist have made some of the research in economics much more credible,” Guido said. “When we started in the mid-80s there was something of a crisis in economics where people felt that a lot of the empirical work that was being done wasn’t credible and people didn’t believe the results. We were at the beginning of a movement that tried to make the work more credible. Angrist later called it a credibility revolution where we developed a bunch of methods that became widely used that changed the way people did empirical work in economics and the way they thought about it.”

Nobel Prize Winner Professor Guido Imbens (MSc Economics, 1986)

Guido humbly dismisses any suggestion that he might have known the significance of the work he was doing at the time.

“I do remember when I was working on it when I was really very happy with it, and I felt that we’d made a lot of progress and understood something that nobody else understood at that time. But I was thinking more at that time like ‘this is a very good idea by my standards’ and that I might be able to publish it in a good journal. That was the extent of my thought about it.”

And what might have made this work stand out as significant for all those who subsequently started engaging with it and giving it the traction that ultimately lead to its influence being recognised at such a level?

“There were a lot of factors and a lot of luck. It was also at a time when the profession was ready for this type of research.

”And this is where asking the right question becomes important. Because Guido’s research is about finding out the correct ways of looking at a problem and the information around it to ensure that the correct inferences can be taken from the results.

“Econometrics is about the study of data,” Guido said. “What I specialise in is trying to figure out methods for drawing causal inferences from observational data. In economics you typically can’t do experiments. You can’t randomly assign some people to college and keep others out, just to figure out what the causal effect is of going to college on labour market outcomes. So we tried to draw those causal inferences from observational data. One of the things I contributed to was developing methods for doing this in settings which are called natural experiments, where there is some idiosyncrasy in the data that helps us uncover the causal effects even though we didn’t do a randomised experiment.

”Today, Guido’s research is still at the cutting edge, working with big tech companies such as Google and Facebook, all of whom have offices that are cyclable from his office at Stanford.

Over time I’ve been much more willing to ask questions, make myself vulnerable and show that I don’t necessarily know all the answers.

Professor Guido Imbens

“One of the interesting things is that they’re doing much more complex experiments than have been traditionally done. Nowadays a lot of these companies are doing experiments in settings with multiple populations of interacting agents – maybe buyers and sellers or rental properties and customers. If you do experiments there whatever you do to one group it’s going to have an effect on the others and you have to take that into account to make sense of the results. There data science and economics come together in a very interesting way.”

We’re proud of Guido and his impact, and proud that by accepting an Honorary Degree he’s renewed his connection with the city and the University. We asked him about having the opportunity to speak to the next generation of students at the graduation ceremony, and his words of advice. He was reticent to offer advice, acknowledging the role that luck has played in his career, but he did, once again, come back to that most important subject that has been key to his work, and which has been immortalised on fridge magnets at the Nobel Prize Museum:

“The importance of being willing to ask questions and asking good questions. Over time I’ve been much more willing to ask questions, make myself vulnerable and show that I don’t necessarily know all the answers. But asking good questions is really important to improve things.”

Professor Guido Imbens was interviewed by David Simpson, Alumni Engagement Manager.

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