Joshua Angrist

Joshua Angrist was born in 1960 in Columbus

Angrist was born in Columbus, Ohio, to a Jewish family and grew up in Pittsburgh. He finished Taylor Allderdice High School in 1977. He earned a B.A. in economics from Oberlin College in 1982.

He lived in Israel from 1982 to 1985. He began graduate studies at the Hebrew University, where he met his future wife, Mira, and then served as a paratrooper in the IDF. He later earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1987 and 1989.

After his doctorate he taught at Harvard University until 1991, then returned to Israel as a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University. He joined the MIT economics department in 1996 and became a full professor in 1998. Since 2008 he has held the Ford Professor of Economics chair at MIT.

His research covers the economics of education, labor markets, immigration and methods for evaluating public policy. He studied class size in Israeli schools, the returns to schooling and charter schools in the United States. With Jörn-Steffen Pischke he wrote the textbooks Mostly Harmless Econometrics and Mastering 'Metrics'.

He co-founded MIT's Blueprint Labs and the ed-tech company Avela. He holds US and Israeli citizenship and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is the father of economist Noam Angrist.