In honor of David Card: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

This paper describes the contribution of David Card, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, to economics and the new empiricism that has become such an important part of the profession. Card's forte is creative and careful empirical scholarship that exploits modern computerized data sets with thousands or hundreds of thousands of observations and that uses plausible sources of exogenous change in key variables to determine behavioral responses. The work has the flavor of a laboratory scientist reporting an experiment. It has illuminated virtually all areas of labor economics and has implications for the understanding of the economy writ large.