On Thursday, April 3, UMass community members attended a lecture by labor economist and University of California, Berkeley professor David Card.

Card is most known for his research on how minimum wage laws and immigration affect the labor market. In his talk, Card referenced his controversial research prior to the implementation of minimum wage laws in New Jersey, and the impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami labor market.

For his research on these topics, Card won one-half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for “empirical contributions to labor economics.”

Card’s talk discussed several topics, including the recent tariffs, saying “I think it’s quite uncertain, and the stock market seems to think so too.”

“Nearly any economist that is sensible is very skeptical about tariffs. There are certain arguments for intervening in trade if another country is doing something shady, but ordinarily there’s huge benefits to most economies from having trade,” Card said.

“I think it’s really interesting how he talked about the other impacts that affect immigration, how sometimes it’s not just about the economic impact of things but whether or not social stimuli have an effect,” Cam White, a junior economics major, said.

With a new crop of college graduates set to enter the workforce in the midst of an unstable economy, Card is pessimistic about the work prospects for graduating UMass students.

Card’s viewpoint is influenced by the looming threat of a recession, saying, “There’s no jobs in the government, and a lot of businesses are very reluctant to hire, because they’re not sure where things are going to come down.”

“If it turns out there’s a recession, they don’t want to have extra workers around that they have to fire, so everyone’s taking a wait-and-see approach,” Card said.

Card mentioned he is not concerned about the ability of new workers entering the labor market to find a job, but the quality of jobs that new workers will have to settle for.

“The employers that everyone would be most interested in working for, or the ‘good jobs,’ cut back more on their hiring in contractionary periods,” Card said. “Many people who graduate from UMass will be able to find a job, but not nearly as good of a quality job as they were hoping to get. The research suggests it’s going to take up to 10 years to get back to where you would’ve been, assuming that the contraction only lasts for a couple years.”

Finally, Card offered a key piece of advice for college students currently studying economics: gain experience in quantitative skills to pair with your economics ideas.

“With an undergraduate degree, you can do a lot with combining data and learning how to organize it,” Card said.

He continued, saying, “It’s very helpful to combine economics with some data science or computer science, where you have a little bit more direct hands-on experience with manipulating data, especially with data science. I do some consulting in the tech sector, where a lot of people are economists with data skills, and they basically combine those two.”

Patricia Dandrea, a community member and UMass Amherst grad from Easthampton, attended the event.

“I think [the lecture] was informative for some who is a non-businessperson, and in the current climate, I want to better understand economics,” Dandrea said.

The 2025 Philip Gamble Memorial Lecture is an annual lecture held by the Department of Economics in memory of Gamble, a former economics faculty member.

“I think the event was wonderful,” Fuhan Ding, a graduate student and sociology major said. “It provided general knowledge about causal inference and the methods we use in this field to explore policy related issues, as well as how it can affect the real world.”

George Coulouras can be reached at [email protected].