To put it extremely, extremely politely this is a minority opinion in the economics profession. (More accurate would be to say no one thinks this.) I don't do

To put it extremely, extremely politely this is a minority opinion in the economics profession. (More accurate would be to say no one thinks this.) I don't do reduced-form causal inference work myself, but I recognize that it is widespread and extremely influential throughout the profession. You can of course argue that someone else should have received the prize. My own preferred candidates did not win. But this work was going to win eventually for sure and to argue that there's a lot of work from the last decade which deserved to win is not credible.