David Card

David Card is a economist Canadian work , and professor with the the University of California to Berkeley.

Card obtains its Bachelor off Arts with Queen' S University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada) in 1978 and its Ph.D. in Economic scenes in 1983 with the Université Princeton.

Between 1988 and 1992, Card is director of drafting of the Journal off Labor Economics . From 1993 to 1997, he is deputy manager of the review Econometrica . He obtains the price Doug Purvis of the Canadian association of economic in 1994, and the Médaille John Bates Clark in 1995.

With the beginning of the year 1990, Card obtains a certain notoriety, like his/her colleague of then with Princeton, Alan Krueger, following a study on the Minimum wage. Card and Krueger call into question one of the conclusions most largely accepted among the economists, that which the minimum wage increase causes mechanically the increase in unemployment rate. While studying the evolution of employment in the Fast-food industry in the New Jersey and the Adjacent states before and after the minimum wage increase in the New Jersey, they arrive at the conclusion which this increase had no impact on the level of employment in this branch. The conclusions of Card and Krueger are not universally accepted, but they are given a considerable credit at the majority of the economists, like Joseph Stiglitz.

By using a similar method, Card also shows that a sudden wave of immigration can not have any effect on unemployment rate. At the time of the Exodus of Mariel of 1980, close to 130 000 refugees leave Cuba for the United States, from which the half settles with Miami. The exodus constitutes a natural Expérience making it possible to measure the capacity for absorption of an economy (here, the town of Miami) to a external Choc (sudden and unforeseen increase in the population). In its study, Card compares the evolution of unemployment rate and the wages with having Miami with four other cities of the close, but nonaffected characteristics by the exodus. If, between April and July 1980, the Unemployment rate increases abruptly, passing from 5% to 7,1%, the study relating to the period 1979-1981 arrives to an opposite conclusion: in Miami, it decreases by 1,2 points (from 5,1 to 3,9%), while in the city-witnesses it decreases only by 0,1 point (from 4,4 to 4,3%). For the black population (the least qualified and a priori most vulnerable to this new competition), the increase in unemployment rate is weaker in Miami than in the city-witnesses. The results are similar for the wages. The conclusions of Card go against the theses on the division of work, supposing that an economy has a fixed number of employment which it is advisable to distribute within a population (Mythe of a fixed quantity of work).

Made Card of other significant contributions about immigration, of education, professional training and the inequality.

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