STOCKHOLM — A U.S.-based economist won the Nobel prize in economics Monday for pioneering research that transformed widely held ideas about the labor force, showing how an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t hinder hiring and immigrants don’t lower pay for native-born workers. Two others shared the award for developing ways to study these types of societal issues.

Canadian-born David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded half of the prize for his research on how the minimum wage, immigration and education affect the labor market.

The other half was shared by Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dutch-born Guido Imbens of Stanford University for their framework for studying issues that can’t rely on traditional scientific methods.

They helped expand the use of “natural experiments,” or studies based on observing real-world data. Such research made economics more applicable to everyday life and spawned a more popular approach to economics epitomized by the bestseller “Freakonomics,” by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt.