By all accounts, Joshua Angrist was one of those cool kids you would have wanted to hang out with at Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill.

He was a partier and an artist. But a future Nobel Prize winner?

“I think if you were to look at Josh’s activities in high school, you would not have predicted that he would win a Nobel Prize,” his younger brother Misha said Monday. “I don’t think that’s shocking. I suspect he would agree with that assessment. He was not terribly engaged with school. He was engaged with other things, like writing plays or taking pictures or playing the guitar.”

But in the wee hours of Monday morning, Joshua Angrist received a phone call informing him that he was one of three U.S.-based economists to win the 2021 Nobel Prize for economics.

“At first, he thought someone was playing a joke on him,” said Misha Angrist.

It was no joke.

The part Angrist played in pioneering research on the labor market impacts of minimum wage, immigration and education, and for creating the scientific framework to allow conclusions to be drawn from those studies, brought him half the prize, along with Dutch-born Guido Imbens of Stanford University.

Angrist, 61, is a 1977 graduate of Allderdice and the oldest son of former Carnegie Mellon University professors Stanley and Sarah Angrist. The family are longtime members of Congregation Dor Hadash in Squirrel Hill. Since the mid-1990s, Joshua Angrist has been on the economics faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is now the Ford Professor of Economics. Before joining MIT, he served on the economics faculty at Hebrew University in Israel.

The other half of the Nobel Prize was awarded to Canadian-born David Card of the University of California at Berkeley. The total value is roughly $1.14 million.

So, what ended up putting Joshua Angrist on a path for the Nobel Prize? His brother said it began when he attended Oberlin College in Ohio.

“When he went to Oberlin and became an economics major, I think that’s when the switch really flipped,” said Misha Angrist, an associate professor and senior fellow in science & society at Duke University. After Oberlin, Joshua Angrist lived in Israel for several years before graduate studies at Princeton, where he received his master’s degree and Ph.D. in economics.

Misha Angrist added that the environment in the Angrist home also contributed to what his brother eventually would accomplish.

“We were always big readers, and both of my parents pursued things that they were passionate about. That’s always been true of Josh. He’s been just relentless in his dedication to (economics),” he said. “Like a lot of first children, he’s always been ambitious and he’s always worked hard.”

Stanley Angrist, who was a mechanical engineering professor at CMU, is the author of seven books and a financial journalist for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal. Sarah Angrist, who was a sociology professor at CMU, had a career in government affairs at PPG Industries.

Ezra Angrist, who works in finance in New York, is the youngest of the Angrist brothers. He, too, attended Oberlin College and studied economics.

Misha Angrist said he had a chance to speak with his brother for “about 60 seconds” because he was being inundated with calls and emails.

Joshua Angrist told MIT News after notification of the award, “I’m overwhelmed,” adding, “I think it’s great recognition for empirical economics. I think this is further evidence that economics has matured greatly as an empirical discipline. Our work has become better, more convincing and more relevant, in policy discussions and to families making decisions.”

“I think my whole family is thrilled for him,” Misha Angrist said, “especially my parents, who are getting up there (in age). I think they’re thrilled that they lived long enough to see this.”

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