Three US-based economists have won this year’s Nobel Prize for their work on real-world experiments that challenged received ideas, including by showing that raising minimum wages need not hurt jobs and that immigration does not always cut pay for native-born workers.

David Card, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, shared the prize with Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Joshua Angrist and Stanford University professor Guido Imbens for their central role in developing the so-called “design-based” approach in economics to answer central questions for society.

The committee awarding the prize, officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, said the three men “revolutionised empirical research” by using natural experiments — real-life situations where chance events or policy decisions create similar conditions to those of a clinical trial.