The Mixtape with Scott

Welcome back to The Mixtape with Scott, a podcast about the lives and stories of living economists. This show often unfolds in themed mini-series, and lately I've been exploring one that I've been curious about for a while: the economists who navigated and participated in the heterodox tradition in economics. Today's guest is Amitava Krishna Dutt, a development economist, now emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. His work sits at the intersection of structuralist macroeconomics, post-Keynesian theory, and development, with deep engagement in political economy. He's long been committed to questions of global inequality, the dynamics of capitalist growth, and the limitations of orthodoxy in addressing the needs of the Global South.So thank you for tuning in. I hope this is as interesting to you as it was to me.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week's episode of The Mixtape with Scott. Today's podcast guest is our 127th guest on the show—Vitor Possebom, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the Fundação Getulio Vargas. Vitor's research sits at the intersection of two areas — econometrics and causal inference, and policy evaluation in Latin America, particularly Brazil. His contributions revolve around refining and extending tools for estimating causal effects in observational data, especially under common data imperfections like selection bias, measurement error, and treatment effect heterogeneity.* Sample selection and marginal treatment effects (e.g., “Identifying Marginal Treatment Effects in the Presence of Sample Selection” (Journal of Econometrics), “Crime and Mismeasured Punishment” (Review of Economics and Statistics))* Misclassification and measurement error (e.g., “Potato Potahto in the FAO-GAEZ Productivity Measures?”)* Inference and sensitivity in synthetic control methods (e.g., “Cherry Picking with Synthetic Controls”, “Synthetic Control Method: Inference, Sensitivity Analysis and Confidence Sets”)* Probability of causation in non-experimental settings (e.g., “Probability of Causation with Sample Selection”)I invited Vitor onto the podcast because of his creative contributions to causal inference, as he fits into a larger informal series I've been for the last several years on causal inference in general. In today's conversation, we talk about Vitor's path from Brazil to Yale University and then back. Vitor, thank you so much for joining us.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to The Mixtape with Scott, a podcast dedicated to exploring the personal stories of living economists. I'm your host, Scott Cunningham, Professor of Economics at Baylor University.Today, I'm delighted to introduce Jessica Brown, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Jessica is also a Research Fellow at IZA and a Faculty Affiliate at the Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities.I invited Jessica onto the podcast because of her deep connections to the credibility revolution, causal inference, and the esteemed tradition of labor economics nurtured at Princeton University's Industrial Relations Section, where she completed her PhD in 2019.Jessica is also joining us as part of a special series I've been hosting, loosely titled "The Students Of..." Within this series, she specifically contributes to our "Students of Alan Krueger" mini-series. Alan Krueger, a pioneering economist whose work profoundly shaped labor economics, tragically passed away in 2019. Jessica was one of Alan's last doctoral students, and his death came shortly before her dissertation defense.In our conversation today, we'll explore Jessica's journey as an economist, her experiences studying under Alan Krueger, and the influence he had on her professional and personal development.Jessica, thank you so much for joining us.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week's episode of The Mixed Tape with Scott. I'm your host, Scott Cunningham. This podcast is devoted to the personal stories of living economists, diving into their lives, careers, and the fascinating paths they've walked.This week's guest is Michael Anderson, an economist from the University of California Berkeley's Department of Agricultural Resource Economics. Michael earned his PhD at MIT in 2006 under the mentorship of Josh Angrist, making him part of a broader narrative I've been exploring—the Princeton Industrial Relations Section and the influential lineage of scholars who shaped the modern credibility revolution in economics.In our conversation, we touch on Michael's rich and varied research. We discuss his insights into the returns to college athletic success, delve into his foundational work on the Perry Preschool program and the challenge of multiple inference, and explore the real-world impacts outlined in his American Economic Review paper on subway strikes and slowdowns. As always, though, this episode is much more than just research highlights—it's about Michael's journey through economics, his stories, and the experiences that have defined his path. I hope you enjoy the show!Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

I'm thrilled to announce that our next guest on The Mixtape with Scott is Professor Philip Oreopoulos—one of the most impactful economists working today in education and labor. A PhD student advisee of David Card, Phil is part of the distinguished lineage that helped shape the credibility revolution in applied microeconomics.Now a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, Phil has spent his career studying how education policies and interventions affect outcomes for students and workers. His work blends rigorous causal inference with real-world relevance to uncover how both the very large interventions we employ to help society, as well as the seemingly surgically narrow ones, shape the lives of workers and students. He's also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His CV is full of important papers, but it's the heart behind the work that really stands out—his curiosity about the world and his desire to make a difference. In this episode, we go beyond the papers. We talk about his journey, what it was like working with David Card, and how he found his calling. It's a thoughtful, warm conversation with a scholar who represents the very best of what economics can be.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

I'm excited to announce the newest episode to the podcast features a brilliant mind in econometrics and applied microeconomics: Dr. Liyang "Sophie" Sun from University College London. While Liyang has technically been a guest before, our previous conversation had been narrowly focused on econometric techniques. This time, we're shifting gears to align with the core purpose of the podcast—exploring the personal stories and journeys of living economists.Many of you know Liyang by reputation or have cited her groundbreaking work. Her 2021 paper with Sarah Abraham in the Journal of Econometrics on difference-in-differences estimated using two-way fixed effects with leads and lags was recognized as one of the recipients of the Aigner award for 2022 —a remarkable achievement. That paper in particular helped clarify exactly what we were—and weren't—measuring in difference-in-differences event studies. Beyond diagnosing issues in existing approaches, they introduced a new and more accurate estimator, known formally as the interaction-weighted estimator, but which most of us now fondly call simply “SA” (Sun and Abraham). I love that paper; it has taught me a great deal.Her research portfolio extends well beyond this, spanning instrumental variables, synthetic control methods, and other innovative approaches that have reshaped how we think about causal inference in economics.In this episode, we'll dive into Liyang's personal journey through growing up in China, coming to the United States as a high school student, and then through college, grad school and a career as a professional economist and econometrician. She generously shares the experiences, people and discoveries that have shaped her career and research directions. It was a genuine pleasure to hear more of her story, and I believe you'll find it both enlightening and inspiring.Thank you again for all your support! Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! This week's guest is Nathan Nunn, professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at University of British Columbia. Nathan is a development economist and economic historian whose work on the development of the African continent has been viewed as pioneering, seminal even. Two of his major works focused on the African slave trade and its impact on trust (here in this AER) and the continent's longterm development (here). The body of work is so massive that I can only point you to his webpage and vita. He's currently an editor at Quarterly Journal of Economics, a member of NBER and a research fellow at BREAD. And here is his google scholar page. And for giggles, here are the people at NotebookLM explaining his vita!Here's that NotebookLM link for people looking on YouTube or podcast platforms like Apple Music or Spotify. url: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/ac825f4e-3e35-4359-b154-bc82ef808a79/audioThanks again everyone and I hope you enjoy this great interview! Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome welcome one and all! This is the newest episode of the The Mixtape with Scott where we talk to living economists, ask them what they wanted to be when they were little, learn what and how they did become, are becoming, what they became as an adult, and this week too, the road less traveled. This week's guest is named Jérémy L'Hour. I first learned about Jeremy because of a JASA on synthetic control he wrote with Alberto Abadie a few years ago entitled “A Penalized Synthetic Control Estimator for Disaggregated Data”. I then learned that Jérémy had studied with Xavier D'Haultfoueuille, the econometrician and coauthor to the famed difference-in-differences estimator in the AER that helped launch a thousand ships on difference-in-differences with differential timing. I reached out to see if we might talk as Jérémy has a story that I have not had a chance to hear about.Jérémy is the author of Machine Learning for Econometrics with Christophe Galliac which is forthcoming at Oxford University Press. And of course he is the author of the JASA on synthetic control with Abadie. But interestingly, he is not an academic. Rather, he works for a hedge fund called Capital Fund Management. Which was another reason I wanted to talk to him.The last many years, we've seen more and more talented economists go into industry rather than academia, but mostly I interview economists in tech. I haven't interviewed anyone who is at a hedge fund before, and I thought that that might be an interesting guest. There's always a lot of uncertainty in the job market, but maybe now more than ever, and hearing about more options in the private sector would be useful to people all over the world. So thank you again everyone for supporting the substack and the podcast. I appreciate it immensely as it helps me to do what I love which is listening to people's stories. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to episode 15 of season 4's The Mixtape with Scott! I am of, you guessed it, Scott. And this is my podcast which is a podcast where I interview economists and ask them about their personal story. If you were dying to know the games that economists played when they were kids, or what books they read in high school, then man are you ever in luck because that's literally what we talk about on here!This week's guest is Dmitry Arkhangelsky, an associate professor at CEMFI in Madrid, Spain. Dmitry is known to many people because of his 2021 American Economic Review article with an Avengers like team of econometricians and statisticians — Susan Athey, Guido Imbens, David Hirshberg and Stefan Wager — entitled “Synthetic Difference-in-Differences”. Synth diff-in-diff is a well known contribution to the pantheon of new causal panel methods and is quite versatile and flexible. Dmitry is currently on leave from CEMFI and had just arrived to Harvard for a research sabbatical when we did this interview. Dmitry is an econometrician and machine learning, and as he's connected to this new diff-in-diff and synth literature that has been exploding and evolving over the last few years, his work on those topics are well known. But I think as he's not on social media, he's not someone people may know as much about. So I hope you that this is an interesting interview for those of you wanting to learn about his life growing up in the bustling city of Moscow, Russia. It's a bit of a rags to riches story in some way as unlike many Russian economists who are dialed into the best schools as a young person, where they are exposed to intensive training in mathematics early on, Dmitry's journey was different, and I don't want to spoil it. But I think it's one that many of us may identify with. Thank you again for all your support of the podcast. It's a labor of love to get to have a chance to just pause, look at another person, and listen. I continue to believe that it's in the moments when we can look at a person that we know ourselves. And so I enjoy doing it and appreciate your support and hope it is the same for you on some level. And thank you to Dmitry for being generous with his time to share a little about his life. Consider becoming a paying subscriber where you get full access to all kinds of weird posts ranging from econometrics, practical opinions about work, discussion of my classes, and taking care of my ailing dad, as well as a fairly regular reflection on the economic implications of new technologies. Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week, I'm thrilled to have Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach as my guest. Diane is the Margaret Walker Alexander Professor in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and a leading voice in the economics of poverty, education, and public policy. Her research focuses on how major programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and early childhood education impact children's long-term outcomes. Diane has published in top-tier journals, testified before Congress, and served in key leadership roles, including as director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings and as director of Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research.Diane is also part of my ongoing series exploring economists with connections to Princeton's Industrial Relations Section. As a former student of the late Alan Krueger, Diane brings a unique perspective to the show, and it was a privilege to hear about her journey—from her work at the Council of Economic Advisers to her impactful research and academic career.Thank you, Diane, for joining me, and thank you for listening! I hope you enjoy the conversation.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this weeks episode of the Mixtape with Scott! This is a podcast about the personal stories of living economists and an oral history of the last 50 years, give or take. And today's guest is part of a larger series about the students of the key founders of the credibility revolution. Today's guest was Alan Krueger's student at Princeton and her name is Marie Connolly, a labor economist and professor at Université du Québec à Montréal.Marie Connolly earned her Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 2007, where she worked under the mentorship of Alan B. Krueger. I first corresponded with Marie right after she published an article estimating intertemporal labor supply elasticities in Journal of Labor Economics in 2008. I was working on a similar paper as hers, in that I was using quasi-experimental changes in weather to estimate labor supply in sex work, but hers was interesting because she framed the project in relation to macroeconomic models that required much larger elasticities than what she and others found using quasi-experimental methods. Connolly's work was emblematic of the “credibility revolution” in economics in that sense and not just through academic lineage at Princeton, Krueger and the Industrial Relations Section. Throughout her career, Connolly has explored two fascinating domains: the economics of music and the intersection of family dynamics and labor markets. Her work on “Rockonomics,” often coauthored with Krueger, investigates the economics of popular music, delving into topics like concert pricing and the secondary ticket market. Equally compelling is her focus on family-related issues, such as child penalties and intergenerational income mobility. Her recent research on child penalties in Canada and the cognitive and non-cognitive effects of class size has echoes of her former advisor's own work on class size. Connolly's dual focus on music and family economics demonstrates her versatility and intellectual curiosity, making her a unique voice in labor economics.Thank you again for your support of the podcast! I hope you find this interview as interesting as I did.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the last podcast interview of 2024! This is the fourth season, 10th episode, which I guess puts us between 110-120 interviews so far. This week's interview with an economist, learning more about their personal story, is Ted Joyce. Ted is a Professor of Economics at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research's Health Economics program. He's renowned for his contributions to demography and reproductive health policy and his work has appeared in top journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, New England Journal of Medicine, and Review of Economics and Statistics. Ted has been a role model for me ever since I graduated in 2007, graciously corresponding with me, meeting with me at conferences, and talking to me about research and navigating the ropes. He was Mike Grossman's student at CUNY, who I interviewed before and who is himself a very prominent health economist who was also one of Gary Becker's first students. As my advisor, David Mustard, was also a Becker student, that makes me and Ted cousins. So it was nice having a family reunion for this interview. Happy new year everyone. May you all be at ease, be at peace, be safe and be happy. 2025 here we come!Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Episode 9, season 4. And I just did the math, and we are at 113 episodes so far since I started. What a fun journey it's been too. So many interesting people, so many interesting stories, so much fun to connect with them and be, for just one hour, getting to hear them all. For those new to the podcast, this is a podcast about the personal stories of living economists where I listen to them share parts of the arc of their journey. Primarily as their life moving towards being an economist and having been one. It moves between the personal and professional in whatever way feels right at the moment. And this week's guest is Francine Blau. Dr. Blau is the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and she's had a long and prolific career studying two overlapping topics — labor economics and the gender wage gap. She is, if I can say it, the labor economist's labor economist. Deep labor economics, relevant, empirical, pioneering. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be in the room with her at SOLE meetings and seminars from the very start. In the interview, we learn a lot about her life. We discussed what it was like at Harvard in the early 1970s, why she chose Harvard over MIT, her father's difficult story as a teacher in the NYC during a difficult time in US political history involving the unions, certain university's bans on allowing women into their PhD programs (e.g., Princeton), and the importance that Richard Freeman had on her committee in what she ultimately ended up writing a dissertation on, which I'll explain in a moment. I promised her an hour, so some of the things I'd wanted to ask, like how she saw the credibility revolution emerge around her, I never got to get to. But I loved what we did get to cover, and wish I had had another hour with her. If I can geek out for just a moment, this is a bit of a longer opener as I normally write, but Francine Blau was truly a pioneer and I'll just mention one thing — her dissertation. I kind of knew that she was a pioneer because I knew about her full body of work, which is frankly gigantic, which was why I wanted to interview her in the first place, but to be honest, I really didn't know the start and that context at all. I think it's fair to say that she was one of the very first economists to be focused on the gender wage gap. I think maybe Claudia Goldin, which I'll mention in a second, would be an exception in that perhaps it's a tie between them. There had been obviously work on the economics of discrimination; that had been Gary Becker's dissertation topic at the University of Chicago in 1955. And Dr. Blau suggested that both Claudia Goldin and Yoram Ben-Porath had also worked on that, but in terms of timing, I think that Dr. Blau predates Ben-Porath but not necessarily Dr. Goldin. Dr. Goldin's first publication on the gender differences is a 1977 article in the Journal of Economic History entitled “Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 to 1880” and I don't think anything Dr. Ben-Porath wrote when Dr. Blau had graduated in 1975 from Harvard. Probably of those two, it would be Goldin's JEH that would be the closest to something as in-depth and which had comparable calendar date timing as to what and when Dr. Blau published her dissertation (as a book in 1977), but very different in that it was contemporary, not historical, and it concerned women in the modern work place, and specifically within the firm itself. Dr. Blau's dissertation was unlike the current style of dissertations which is the “three essay” model. It was a book length dissertation which she published in 1977 entitled Equal Pay in the Office. It was a 1975 dissertation that far predates the work that would come much later on the personnel economics literature we associate with Ed Lazear and Sherwin Rosen. Her dissertation explores many topics that would've perfectly fit into that material, but predates it by maybe 10 years arguably, and focuses intently on gender wage disparities between male and female office workers in the United States. She in that dissertation, written partly under the guidance of the labor economist Richard Freeman, examined the extent of wage differentials in the office place, explores the factors contributing to these disparities, and evaluates the effectiveness of equal pay legislation in addressing gender-based wage inequality. I found a copy of it, which I think may be out of print, and am ordering it now, but from what I have been able to gather, it was way ahead of its time, and I mean that. Dr. Blau is a role model for many people, myself included. The steady march of her career, the consistency, the work ethic, the creativity — it's the hallmark of a great economist and great scholar. I asked her how she managed to do it and it was interesting what she told me — she attributed a desire to not let down her coauthors as part of how she's managed to maintain that steady body of work for the last 50 years. That's a lesson I'm going to try to remember going forward. This is again a great interview to share. Share with friends, family, students and colleagues, mentors, people outside economics, people inside economics. I was very inspired by the interview and hope you are too.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the latest episode of The Mixtape with Scott! This week's guest on the podcast is Jann Spiess. Many of you probably know Jann from his work with Kirill Borusyak and Xavier Jaravel on diff-in-diff. Others may know him for his work on machine learning. Now you get to know him for a third reason which is contained on this podcast! Jann is an assistant professor at Stanford. He's one of a younger cohort of talented econometricians who have been making practically helpful contributions to the toolkit in causal inference and machine learning, including work on synthetic control with Guido Imbens and much more. This was a great interview and I learned a lot about Jann I didn't know about. And I hope you enjoy it it too!Thanks again for all your support! Share this video or podcast with whoever you think would like it!Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to The Mixtape with Scott, the podcast where we explore the personal stories behind the professional lives of economists. I'm your host, Scott Cunningham, coming to you from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Each week, we dive into the journeys, insights, and lives of economists whose work shapes how we understand the world.This week's guest is Elizabeth Cascio. Elizabeth studies education, public policy, and the well-being of children. Her research often looks at big policy changes in 20th-century America, like the spread of publicly funded early education and major civil rights, education, and immigration laws. Recently, she's focused on childcare and early education, trying to understand how policy design, economic conditions, and political voice shape educational attainment and economic mobility.Elizabeth's work has been published in leading economics journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and The Journal of Public Economics. She's also written policy pieces for The Hamilton Project. She's a professor at Dartmouth College and holds research affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor. She's served on editorial boards and is currently an editor at The Journal of Labor Economics.This episode is also part of a series I've been doing called “The Students of…,” where I talk to students of economists in areas I'm particularly interested in. One of those areas is “The Students of David Card.” Elizabeth earned her Ph.D. at Berkeley, where David Card and Ken Chay—both key figures in the development of causal inference within labor economics—were significant influences on her work. Once you hear about her research, their impact becomes clear.Elizabeth's work touches on economic history, but she's primarily a labor economist and public policy researcher. She uses history as a tool to understand policy and its impacts on children and families. Her work connects the past to the present in ways that make big questions about education and mobility clearer.So, let's jump in. Please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Cascio to The Mixtape with Scott. Elizabeth, thanks for being here. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the latest episode of the Mixtape with Scott. This week my guest is Tim Bartik from the Upjohn Institute. Let me briefly share some things about Tim. Many of you may know Tim from the shift-share instrument which oftentimes is referred to as Bartik instruments. That's what I refer to it in a section of my book, for instance. It has been more carefully studied by econometricians over the last few years, such as Borusyak, Hull and Jaravel who have studied it from the shock side, and Goldsmith-Pinkham, Sorkin and Swift from the share side. Tim has spent a career studying public policy as a a labor economist who focuses a lot on economic development and regional labor markets. This interview was a candid one where Tim generously shared many aspects of his professional journey, as well as his personal philosophical perspectives on work and public policy. I think many of you will find it interesting and even inspiring, particularly those of you whose first love is policy and labor. Thank you again for your support! I hope you find this an interesting and inspiring interview with a great economist. Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Greetings everyone! The leaves on the tree are turning orange as we inch our way towards Halloween and some of us in some unbearably hot portions of the world get to finally see how the good half live and have a whisper of pleasant weather even if it will only be here for a second or two. This week's guest on the Mixtape with Scott is Miikka Rokkanen. Miikka is in Consumer Behavior Analytics at Amazon and is part of two of my larger series. First, he is part of my stories about the PhD economists who have gone into the tech industry. But Miikka also fits in another long running story about the “children and grandchildren of the credibility revolution”. That is, Miikka went to MIT for his PhD and was one of Joshua Angrist's advisees. Miikka can share his full story but he is an economist who started out in academia (Columbia University) and then early on moved into industry at Amazon and having lived both lives can share what that has been like for him. It was great getting to know him better and hearing what his life journey has been like and I hope you enjoy this interview.For those new to the podcast, though, this is not really a podcast about economics but rather is a podcast about economists. It's a podcast devoted to sharing economists' stories about how they got from the point of being a little kid, going through grade school, high school, college and their PhDs into the careers they're in now. And in learning and hearing these stories and sharing them, it's hoped that over time it can form a bit of an oral history of the profession. I select people based on larger series I'm interested in — like “Economics who go into tech” or “the students of …” — so it is not exhaustive, and won't be, but I hope nonetheless that these stories can help, encourage and expand your imagination. Thank you again for all your support.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott! It's a pleasure to introduce this week's guest from Stanford University, Maya Rossin-Slater. Maya is a health economist who specializes in areas related to families in particular. Early work of hers focused on public policies aimed at labor markets as an avenue for helping families, notably paid leave. Her work has been unique for focusing on all parts of the family — mothers, fathers, as well as children. Her more recent work has moved into distressful events that affect all people in the family, and which most recently has moved into focusing on school shootings' effects on the survivors. When you list all of Maya's work, you can see patterns — spillovers within and across families, within schools, distressful events impact on the family, assistance in the labor market and its effect on families, and various topics in health. It's a robust research agenda that seems to have over time shown real patterns of interest spanning all topics relevant to our understanding of the family as an important part of society, and policies that can help, including policies that encourage work.But it is also fun to have Maya on the show because as longtime listeners know, I have an abiding interest in the “children and grandchildren of the revolution” — meaning those economists who can trace their lineage back to the Princeton Industrial Relations Section. And Maya is also a grandchild of the revolution. Her advisor was Janet Currie whose advisors were Orley Ashenfelter and David Card. So it is interesting to see the propagation of that department moving through the profession. May is only a few links removed from it, but you can see all the finger prints of the Section on her work — meticulous, observant, seeking credible answers to important policy questions regarding workers and their families using credible sources of variation that resemble an experimental design framework. So thank you for all tuning in! And thank you for all your wonderful support.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! Sometimes the shortest distance between point A and point B is a straight line, but other times the shortest distance is a winding path. This week's guest, Mohammad Akbarpour from Stanford University, is perhaps an example of the latter. Mohammad is a micro theorist at Stanford who specializes in networks, mechanism and design and two sided matching. Mohammad is an emerging young theorist at Stanford, student of such luminaries as Matt Jackson and Al Roth, whose background in engineering, mathematics and computer science has given him a fresh approach to topics that I associate with Stanford's theory people as a whole — policy oriented, applied work, mechanism design, networks and matching. He got into economics “the long way” — growing up in Iran, majoring in engineering, and then moving into Stanford's operations research PhD program. In this interview, he generously shares a snippet of the arc of his life, and it's a remarkable story, and one I really enjoyed hearing. I think you will too. Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Greetings! Today's guest on the Mixtape needs no introduction, but I guess I will anyway. N. Greg Mankiw is a household name to many of us in economics. Either you are a macroeconomist, and his work in new Keynesian economics was something that you had come to know extremely well, or you are literally every other economist, and his principles of economics textbooks you know backwards and forwards because it was either the book you studied as a sophomore in college, or probably even more common, it was the book you used to learn how to teach economics. This interview was a lot of fun, and it kind of fits in a way with something that I keep gravitating towards which is to talk to people in economics who have written textbooks — people like Bill Greene, Mas Col-ell, Jeff Wooldridge, Angrist and Pischke. Thanks again for tuning in.And I know I said I was going to move to doing these every other week, but man does it seem like it's been a long time since I've done one, so I'm not sure but I will have to decide if I can handle doing them only every other week. We'll see.Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome the Mixtape with Scott! This is a podcast with a simple objective: listen to the personal stories of living economists who are the primary guests I have on the show. The secondary goal is to follow a thread of people around topics I care about and allow a patchwork story of the profession to form based on, from and through those personal narratives. This is the 105th episode of the podcast, and the first episode of season four. Wow! Time flies. Today's guest is name known to most — Dr. Janet Currie. Dr Currie attended Princeton for her PhD, graduating in 1988, spent a large chunk of her career at UCLA, before coming back to Princeton where she is now the Henry Putnam Professor in both the economics dept and the policy school. She's had an illustrious and impactful career, which is still going, managing a deep portfolio of scientific contributions that I struggle to synthesize it easily. But broadly speaking, her work has focused a lot children, health, mental health, substance abuse and public policy. The work has so many connections over time but also across studies that it was surprising to be honest as we spoke how so much of her work went together, even when it seemed like it wasn't obvious that it would — even her early work on collective bargaining and teachers unions leads to children, both through schools but also the household bargaining models of the early 80s. Her work on the mental health of children leads naturally into her later work on opiates when you consider the links connect through supply side treatment of attention deficit disorder and supply side prescriptions of opiates. All I could see as we spoke was this giant knowledge graph, like a spider web, connecting papers and topics to one another even when the topics themselves would shift. It was a real joy to have a chance to hear this career in her own words.One of the themes of the podcast has been the credibility revolution, which is a paradigm regarding empirical work that emerged in the 1970s at Princeton University. It is largely associated with the Industrial Relations Section, Orley Ashenfelter, and his many students and the students of his students. And Janet was an Orley student, as well as the student of one of Orley's students, the 2021 Nobel Laureate David Card. Having her on here, and the openness with which she shared her story with me, allowed me to learn more about the program at the time she was there, for which I am grateful on top of being grateful for hearing her story.Thank you for your support and I hope this interview is one you enjoy. It's 90 minutes but it's a high mean low variance 90 minutes in my opinion!Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott, a podcast devoted to listening to the personal stories of living economists and creating an oral history of the profession. This episode is partly inspired by my visit to San Sebastián, Spain, with my daughter right now and partly inspired by a 2003 article co-authored with Alberto Abadie studying the effect of terrorism on economic growth that introduced the synthetic control estimator. My guest is Javier Gardeazabal, a professor at the University of the Basque Country. Javier Gardeazabal is a professor at the University of the Basque Country whose body of work has covered topics in macroeconomics, time series econometrics, labor economics, cultural economics, and political economy. He did his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in May 1991, an experience that he will share about in the interview. He is from the Basque Country and returned to the Basque Country after graduation where he has been ever since. It is therefore inspiring to me that his home became the topic of a paper that he is perhaps most widely known for — a seminal contribution to both causal inference and measuring the economic costs of terrorism, coauthored with Alberto Abadie, in the 2003 American Economic Review paper, “The Economic Cost of Conflict: A Case Study of the Basque Country.” This groundbreaking study made a major contribution to causal inference by introducing the synthetic control estimator, but also assessing the economic impact of terrorism on economic growth in the Basque Country. It was a major contribution to the field possessing all the elements of great articles in economics — an important question answered extraordinarily well with clarity and rigor. This influential paper not only cast a massive shadow over the evolution of causal inference and econometrics; it also accelerated Javier's own research to include not only macroeconomics, but also the economics of terrorism and conflict. His career is evidence of an economist who followed his curiosity and intellectual interests to include understanding the economic costs of terrorism, introducing methods for measuring the aggregate cost of conflict, and the impact of political violence on economic well-being, but also exchange rate dynamics, time series econometrics, cultural policies, optimal test scoring methods, gender wage discrimination and more. Javier's versatility is evident in his ability to adapt to and excel in a variety of economic topics and methodologies, continually evolving to address new and relevant economic issues.Thank you again everyone for supporting the podcast and the substack. I hope that this interview speaks to you wherever you are, whenever you are. Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week's episode of “The Mixtape with Scott”! My podcast tries to capture the personal stories of living economists and create an oral history of the profession from the narratives. And this week, I'm thrilled to welcome Dr. Avinash K. Dixit, a distinguished economist whose life's work has influenced many fields within economics. But let me start by telling you a little about his background.Dr. Dixit is the John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University. He also serves as a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and is a Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. For his many contributions to science, he has been awarded numerous accolades, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He was also honored with India's Padma Vibhushan in 2016, recognizing his outstanding contributions to literature and education.As he will share, he was born in Mumbai, India and attended St. Xavier's College where he earned a degree in Mathematics and Physics. Afterwards, he earned another degree (also in mathematics) from Cambridge before going to MIT to get his PhD where he was supervised by the late Robert Solow. After graduation, he went to Berkeley, Oxford, Warwick and then Princeton where he's been since 1981. Both the sheer number of contributions he has made to many fields, but also their influence, is incredible. I put in the title for this episode simply “Microeconomics” after his name, but that was a difficult decision as his work spans microeconomic theory, game theory, international trade, industrial organization, and public economics, just to name a few. I could've written any one of those and it would've still been inadequate. His recent work continues to address pressing global issues, such as optimal policies for green power generation and the dynamics of social, political, and economic institutions. He is an example of someone who follows his heart and his mind, even taking risks throughout his career to leave entire fields of inquiry in search of more questions. In addition to his long list of scientific manuscripts, there have also been many influential books, both textbooks but also more ones aimed at a broader population of readers. Things like “Theory of International Trade” (with Victor Norman), “Investment Under Uncertainty” (with Robert Pindyck), “The Art of Strategy” (with Barry Nalebuff), and “Games of Strategy” (with Susan Skeath and David Reiley). So I'll stop there and turn it over to the show's host — myself — and my guest, Dr. Dixit. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of “The Mixtape with Scott.” If you enjoy our conversation, please share the podcast and help us continue to bring you stories from the world of economics.Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week's episode of "The Mixtape with Scott”! This podcast is dedicated to capturing the personal stories of living economists and creating an oral history of the profession through these narratives. This week, I'm excited to welcome David Autor, an esteemed labor economist from MIT, where he serves as the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor, as well as the Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He was also last year's VP of the AEA, is on the Foreign Affairs board of the US State Department, and is a Digital Fellow at Stanford Digital Economy Lab. The number of accolades is too numerous to list, though, so I will just say that David's pioneering work in labor economics, particularly on the impact of trade, technological change, and the computerization of work, has significantly shaped and re-shaped our understanding of these critical areas.David Autor is perhaps best known for his influential research on the economic impacts of globalization and technological advancements. His groundbreaking study with David Dorn and Gordon Hanson on the effects of Chinese trade on U.S. labor markets highlighted the deep and often painful economic adjustments faced by local labor markets exposed to import competition. Additionally, his work on the computerization of labor, including studies on skill-biased technological change, has provided crucial insights into how technological advancements reshape the labor market and wage structures.One of the things you'll learn in the interview, just as a teaser, is that David was mentored by Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, and that mentorship had a lasting effect. Not only did it changed his own human capital and trajectory, it seems also that it changed David's own attitudes about mentorship. And although we couldn't delve into artificial intelligence in our conversation, Autor's extensive research on the computerization of labor probably positions him as one of a handful of working economists at the moment whose voice will be kay in understanding the future intersections of AI and labor economics, and probably more than that. So with that I'll stop, but thanks again to everyone for all your support. If you like the podcast, please share it!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Today, I get to have on the show someone who has become something of a friend the last few years, an expert in health economics and social policy, Adriana Lleras-Muney at UCLA, a Professor of Economics at UCLA.Dr. Lleras-Muney's journey in economics is super impressive and even involves traveling through all the alleyways of causal inference. After earning her Ph.D. from Columbia University where she wrote a job market paper on compulsory schooling, at a time where it had just become accepted wisdom that the Angrist and Krueger 1991 article needed a fresh take. She then went to Princeton, the birth place of causal inference in labor, before making her way to UCLA where Guido Imbens had just gotten to, and who is also now one of her coauthors in a new article at the Quarterly Journal of Economics. So when I think about her story, it's hard for me not to hear the echoes, I guess, of the history of causal inference too. Her academic accolades are too many to name, but I'll name a few. She's an associate editor for the Journal of Health Economics and serves on the board of editors for both the American Economic Review and Demography. She's also been a permanent member of the Social Sciences and Population Studies Study Section at the National Institute of Health and an elected member of the American Economic Association Executive committee. In 2017, her contributions to the field were recognized with the prestigious Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).But what really sets Adriana apart is her groundbreaking research. She's been at the forefront of exploring the relationships between socioeconomic status and health, with a particular focus on education, income, and policy. Her recent work has taken a fascinating turn, examining the long-term impact of government policies on children. She's been digging into programs like the Mother's Pension program and the Civilian Conservation Corps from the first half of the 20th century, uncovering insights that are still relevant today. Her work has appeared in all the major journals in economics such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, The Review of Economic Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.So, all that said, I hope you find this interview as interesting as I did. The video will be posted most likely later to YouTube; my Scottish hotel has surprisingly very slow internet and I'm still downloading the video, and so will likely be uploading it too all night. But thank you again for all your support. Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

We have officially passed 100 episodes with today's guest, and it's wonderful to get to do it with my good friend, Manisha Shah. Manisha is the Chancelor's Professor of Public Policy at University of California Berkeley. Manisha is an applied microeconomist who has historically specialized in topics related to health, education, gender and labor, with a particular focus on low and middle income countries. She has research appointments at NBER, BREAD, J-PAL, IZA and is also an editor at Journal of Health Economics as well as an associate editor at Review of Economics and Statistics. And if I can for just a moment tell you a little about that work, please bear with me.First the main area of her work that I am familiar with is the part that overlaps with my own historical research agenda in sex markets. That is because Manisha is arguably the leading expert on the economics of sex markets and has been for many years. She has published on just that topic alone in many high impactful studies like the effect of both legalizing sex work (Review of Economic Studies with me) and the effect of criminalizing it (Quarterly Journal of Economics with Lisa Cameron and Jennifer Seager), the identification of compensating wage differentials for unprotected sex (Journal of Political Economy with Paul Gentler and Stefano Bertozzi) as well as a Journal of Human Resources with Raj Arunachalam on a related topic, and more. But that is just her work on sex markets. There are also her many papers related to children development, like her Journal of Political Economy examining investments in human capital and child labor supply, her work on left-handedness and child development in Demography, another paper of hers looking at parents' investments in children by their underlying ability, her AEJ: Applied looking at the impact of children's development on their mother's own labor supply, her work on sanitation and child development, and it goes on and on. There is also her work looking at people's own risk preferences and how it relates to natural disasters they have experienced. One last thing and I'll quit listing. But one of the things I admire about Manisha's research is the shoe leather involved. Her usually involves primary data collection, running randomized field experiments, working directly with stakeholders, in places like Uganda, Mexico, India, Tanzania and more. It's such a nice treat, then, to get to interview her for the 100th episode, not just because I get to share her personal story to those who only know her by reputation, but also because I count her as one of my closest friends inside and outside the profession. We worked together on a study about the legalization of sex work in Rhode Island that took around ten years from start to completion to publication. It was during a difficult time for me personally and working on that project with her meant a lot to me everyday, but more than that, working with her meant a lot to me everyday. She says in the interview that me and her similar in that we are both intense and very into our projects, and that's true. But I guess I never really noticed that about her — all I have ever seen with Manisha is someone who is unbelievably kind, unbelievably fun and funny, unbelievably down to earth, non-judgmental, approachable, disarming, insightful, and hard working. All I can is that she has never once made me feel anything other than better about myself. Being around her, being friends with her, I mean, always leaves me feeling better than I think I would feel without her, and for that I am beyond grateful for her presence in the world. Forget the profession — in the world. So with that let me introduce you to her. Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

My producer is on vacation this week, and so I am unable to post my latest episode, so I thought I'd post an oldie but a goodie — my season 2 opening interview with Jeff Wooldridge, a much beloved econometrician and economist at Michigan State. So enjoy! Apologies and I'll see you all next week with a new guest! Thanks again for all your support. Ciao!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Greetings listeners! It is a pleasure to introduce this week's guest on the podcast, Ashesh Rambachan, an assistant professor of economics at MIT. I wanted to talk to Ashesh for two main reasons. First, because I wanted to, and second, because I was aware of some of his recent work in econometrics. His recent article on evaluating the fragility of parallel trends in difference-in-differences just came out in the Review of Economic Studies. I'm also intrigued by his work with Sendhil Mullainathan on machine learning, algorithmic fairness as well as generative AI. Having a specialist in both causal inference, artificial intelligence and machine learning is rare, so I thought sitting down with him to learn more about his story would be a lot of fun, not just for me, but for others too. With that said, here you go! I hope you enjoy the interview! Thank you again for all your support!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest on the Mixtape with Scott is esteemed labor economist, Henry Farber, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Dr. Farber's accolades are numerous: a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the Society of Labor Economists, and the Labor and Employment Relations Association, past President of the Society of Labor Economists, and recipient of the 2018 Jacob Mincer Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Labor Economics. You can find more information about his background here in this short biography.But ironically, it was for a different reason that I wanted to reach out to him. I was interested in reaching out to Dr. Farber because of his traditional approach to labor economics, such as his seminal work on labor unions and the behavior of New York City taxi drivers (to name just two). His research provides a distinct perspective on labor economics, one that doesn't fall squarely into the natural experiment momentum of his contemporaries at Princeton, despite being part of the Industrial Relations Section there. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did! Thank you again for all your support!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week's episode of "The Mixtape with Scott" features a conversation with Sarah Miller, a health economist at the University of Michigan. Sarah has made significant contributions to the field of economics, particularly in understanding gender dynamics and reproductive health. Her research has been influential in shaping public policy, and her groundbreaking study on the effect of Medicaid on mortality, conducted with Laura Wherry and Norman Johnson and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, stands out as a seminal work. In this episode, we delve into her academic journey, the personal experiences that have shaped her interests, and the impactful research that drives her career.Beyond her impressive scholarly achievements, we explore the passion and curiosity that fuel her work, as well as her vision for future research. Sarah shares reflections on her personal life, offering a glimpse into the challenges and triumphs that have defined her path. Join us as we uncover the story of a dedicated scholar whose work not only advances economic theory but also has tangible impacts on public health and gender equity. This episode was a thought-provoking exploration of Sarah Miller's remarkable career and the innovative research that continues to inspire her.Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week's episode of "The Mixtape with Scott" features an insightful conversation with E. Glen Weyl, a distinguished economist whose career has spanned academia and industry. Glen earned his PhD from Princeton, spent three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and served as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he made significant contributions to micro theory applications to industrial organization. However, Glen's journey took a transformative turn when he left academia to join Microsoft, where he currently leads the Plural Technology Collaboratory, focusing on technological solutions for societal cooperation.Many listeners might recognize Glen from his influential book "Radical Markets," co-authored with Eric Posner. This work introduced the innovative voting mechanism known as quadratic voting, reflecting Glen's deepening interest in democratic processes and governance. His latest book, "Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy,” (Amazon link) co-authored with Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang, serves as a manifesto for harnessing digital technology to foster social unity and diversity. The book presents bold ideas, from digitally empowered communication to transforming global trade, aiming to enrich relationships and ensure inclusivity.In addition to his writing, Glen has also ventured into film as an executive producer of the documentary "Good Enough Ancestor," which highlights Audrey Tang's work in digital democracy. That trailer can be found here; Glen was executive producer on it.Throughout our interview, Glen shares his experiences and insights from his varied projects, illustrating his renaissance man persona. From his academic roots to his pioneering efforts at Microsoft and beyond, Glen's story is a testament to his innovative spirit and dedication to leveraging technology for societal good. This episode promises to be an engaging exploration of his remarkable career and visionary ideas.So thank you for once again for tuning into the podcast! I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. Don't forget to subscribe, follow, all that and tell people about it! Thank you for reading Scott's Substack. This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week on the podcast, Matthew Jackson from Stanford University is the guest and it was such a delight for me to talk to him and get to know his story a little better. I'd met him before, but only briefly, but I'd read a lot of his work because I once developed and taught a class on networks for our masters of economics students. His textbook on the economic and social networks is excellent but he also has a general interest book on networks if you're wanting something more accessible. As the podcast is technically both listening to the stories of living economists and an oral history project, maybe it is worth noting this (though I think it's obvious to most listeners) that Matt is a micro theorist whose work has empirical content. Not all micro theory does and not all empirical work is necessarily theoretically driven, which is why I make that technical distinction. Networks are also, I think, so clearly an important part of human existence. We make friends, we catch diseases, we learn about opportunities (and maybe as importantly, don't learn about opportunities) because of networks. And so in a very real sense, even the classical definition of economics proposed by Lionel Robbins, that economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources by people with unlimited desires, can alone justify the study of networks if networks, as opposed to merely markets and market prices, are actually an important part of that resource allocation process itself. It's so interesting — as someone nearly 50 to consider all the ways economics evolved over the last 50 years and continues to evolve while still remaining at its core connected to core questions like “how do humans manage to survive on this planet given they have so little time and so little resources?” Anyway, one last thing. At the end of the podcast, I ask Matt about his new work on artificial intelligence. The paper is at PNAS and is currently unlocked. It's entitled “A Turing Test of Whether AI Chatbots are Behaviorally Similar to Humans” and it's by Matt, Qiaozhu Mei, Yutong Xie, and Walter Yuan. They had ChatGPT-4 play a variety of classic games, like dictator games, prisoner's dilemma, and so on. And they mapped the way the chatbot played to the way humans have planed these games in the lab. The one thing that I found really interesting in what they found was that ChatGPT-4 is altruistic. “It” appears to play the game altruistically in the sense that it attempts to maximize a weighted average of both its payouts and its opponent's payouts. What then should we expect if we in the long run end up with a network of chatbots? Hard to say what the general equilibrium will be as game theoretic equilibria are often surprising and not immediately intuitive and usually depend on institutions and incentives, but still it's quite fascinating to me. I hope you liked this interview! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott where I get to interview Bruce Sacerdote, the Richard S. Braddock 1963 Professor in Economics at Dartmouth. Bruce is a prolific labor economist whose work spans the range of crime, education and peer effects. Some of his papers have been some of my favorite, even. His early work on crime with Ed Glaeser used to really interest me. But it was his work on peer effects that I found really fascinating. This old paper in the QJE about how friendships form I must have read almost 20 years and it still sticks in my head. I think Bruce, though, was one of the first people that I ever encountered after graduating that was very clearly part of this credibility revolution. His papers, if it used instruments, typically would use lotteries as instruments. Or if he was studying peer effects, it was lotteries. Well, not surprisingly, Bruce was there at Harvard as a PhD student in the first class that Imbens co-taught with Don Rubin on causal inference. His classmates in that class were Rajeev Dehejia and Sadek Wahba, authors of classic applied papers on the propensity score. In fact, Bruce's own project for that class was also published — a paper estimating the causal effect of winning lottery prizes on labor market outcomes (published in the 2001 AER). So this was fun, and I hope you enjoy it too. Apologies I ramble for so long at the start. Not sure what got into me.Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest on the Mixtape with Scott is someone I've admired for a very long time, even before I entered graduate school in 2002. Peter J. Boettke is the Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, the Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. It's hard to summarize just how important Peter has been to the story of Austrian economics, but in my mind, he's been one of the most influential people in that long tradition, both for his scholarly work on political economy, public choice and institutions, his leadership at George Mason, where the Austrian tradition has continued to thrive, and as a mentor to young people. I can only speak to myself, but I have looked up to Peter for a very long time as it was always very clear that he was a humble and serious scholar who also gave an incredible amount of time and mentorship to his students. All of those are to me examples of what I find to characterize some of the best of the profession's larger story, and so it was a real pleasure for him to sit down with me to talk about his career. I found it so interesting to hear his story in his own words, the economists he looked up to as a young person, his genuine love of economics, as a field, and how much he holds up his students and colleagues. Thank you, as always, for taking the to tune in. I hope you enjoy this time with Peter as much as I did. Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest on the Mixtape with Scott is Jesse Rothstein, the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Public Policy at UC-Berkeley and the Faculty Director of the California Policy Lab. Jesse has a long list of things to which he's made meaningful contributions, ranging from labor economics, to discrimination, to education, to causal inference and more. He's also one of the “students of David Card” guests that I wanted to have on the podcast, as Card was his adviser way back in the day. For those curious about the paper we are talking about towards the end (“augmented synthetic control”), it's one of my favorites in the synthetic control literature. The link to it is here. Good luck everyone this week and thanks for tuning is as always!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! We are getting closer to the hundredth episode! This is our 91st interview if I include Adam Smith (played by ChatGPT-4), which I absolutely will be counting. And the guest is someone I have admired for a long time — Martin Gaynor, or “Marty”. Marty is the J. Barone University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon both in the economics department and their policy school, Heinz College. But he is also special adviser to Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the federal Department of Justice, and it is not the first time that Marty has served in government as a public servant. He is also a former Director of the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. You can read some about his new position in the Department of Justice here. Marty works on the supply side of health, you might say, as opposed to the demand side. He studies markets and concentration, hospitals, firm competition, pricing — not just our health behaviors, but also the supply of healthcare through a mixture of market and non-market processes. If you go through his vita, you can see he's racked up a lot of awards and publications over the years. There are many things you can say about Marty, and after this interview, two came to mind — resilient and kind. It was actually almost not the case that he would become as successful as an economist as he became, as he will share in this interview. He struggled initially to get a tenure track job, and even left academia briefly as a result. He is remarkably upbeat and realistic about the good fortune that he has had, though. And as you will see in this interview, it is very clear that he is a genuinely kind and warm hearted person.Marty also is a survivor in a more literal sense. He was nearly murdered in the antisemitic terrorist attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. That is his story to tell in this interview, not mine, but I will leave it at that. All of our stories matter. No matter who is listening or reading this, their personal story matters, and I hope that this interview is interesting and that you enjoy getting to know Marty a bit better. Thank you for all your support!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the 12th episode of the third season of the Mixtape with Scott, a podcast devoted to listening to the stories of living economists. This week's guest is Daniel Chen, an economist at the Toulouse School of Economics. I had a chance to meet Daniel when he came to Baylor and presented to use a tour de force of his body of scholarship, and I was mesmerized by it. Except for one other person, I had not met someone with that level of productive scholarly energy before. I was really stunned by how much work he had crammed into a career, spreading so many topics, and yet all held together under this umbrella of "political economy". I knew of many of Daniel's works by reputation and one in particular we discuss which is about a law and economics program that trained federal judges, but I hadn't met him before, and I did not put two and two together that he had gone to MIT and had on his committee Bannerjee, Duflo, Kremer and Angrist -- four key Nobel laureates in the history of causal inference and the natural experiment movement that really captured the profession. So I asked him if we could talk and I could hear his story and he agreed. Daniel will share it in this talk as we go through the kind of kid he was, and probably frankly still is, a deeply curious, very meticulous, thoughtful, and creative person. We talked about his childhood, majoring in applied math at Harvard, being very drawn to theory and yet people, making economics a surprising and unexpected opportunity for him, and eventually becoming what he told me was a "data rat" who collected datasets. He also fits with this other part of the professional story that I've been wanting to share with people which are these economists that also go to law school and JDs. He after finishing MIT decided to get a JD at Harvard law school, and his explanation for it is kind of interesting because it all feels somehow unplanned and yet clearly he is, in my opinion anyway, driven by his own goals. I loved meeting him, loved talking to him, loved listening to his story, and I hope you do too! Thank you for tuning in as always!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! To set up this week's guest, let me just share real quick a personal anecdote. When I graduated college, I got a job as a qualitative research analyst doing focus groups and in-depth interviews. I had majored in literature, so this was my first exposure to anything related to the social sciences. I loved the freedom the job gave me to collect my own data and develop my own theories about why people did the things they did. In the evenings I would read articles and books in sociology and anthropology as I felt more grounding in the social sciences could help me in doing a better job. One night I read Gary Becker's Nobel Prize speech, “The Economic Way of Looking at Life”, at the University of Chicago's John M. Olin working paper series. I was hooked. By the time I finished his speech, I knew I wanted to be an economist. But then I read other things too, like a quantitative paper by John Lott and David Mustard's quantitative study on concealed carry laws and crime, and was equally mesmerized. And in that working paper series, I kept coming across references to someone named Ronald Coase and I then went elsewhere to learn about him and his prolific work. David Mustard was a Gary Becker student, and his paper on concealed carry had left an impression on me. He was an assistant professor at the University of Georgia so I applied there and one other school that used his county level crime data for studies on crime. I got into both and went with my ex-wife to visit the school and the faculty. In preparing for the trip, I read a paper by a professor at the University of Georgia named Peter Klein. The paper was entitled “New Institutional Economics” and it drew extensively on that Nobel Prize winning economist I had been learning about, Ronald Coase, another Nobel Laureate named Doug North at Washington University, and Oliver Williamson, a professor at Berkeley. The article was fascinating. It was about a field called “New Institutional Economics”, which I'd never heard of, and Klein explained it well. It was about the endogenous evolution of “institutions” to support and facilitate the organization of human interactions at a high level, most often to support commerce and trade though not just that. The ideas were deep and fascinating. I remember reading that article with a pen and highlighter, going over it and over it, hanging on every word. Not only was the topic fascinating, the author writing it was an excellent writer. There was not a wasted word in it. So when I met with the faculty, including Peter, I was sold on Georgia. But unfortunately, Peter was leaving Georgia for Mizzou and so I just barely missed being in the department with him. So that is a long winded bit of background into telling you that today's guest is someone I've known now for over 20 years — Peter Klein, the W. W. Caruth Endowed Chair at Baylor University in the Entrepreneurship department. Peter is now a professor as well as the department chair at Baylor in our Entrepreneurship department. And so it is my pleasure to introduce you to him. Peter did a PhD at Berkeley and studied under Oliver Williamson, who I mentioned earlier. Williamson would go on to win the Nobel Prize for extending Coase's theory of the firm and helping develop a more robust theory based on transaction cost economics. Peter's work on the firm extends a lot of this work on transaction cost economics continues in that line focusing on the organization of the firm. He is the author of countless articles as well as a new book entitled Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company (with Nicolai Foss). It has been a real joy having him here since I missed him the first time around.As long time listeners know, though, I typically am doing a “mini-series” within the podcast, though, and Peter fits into one of those mini-series. Those mini-series are “the econometricians”, “causal inference and natural experiment methodology”, “Becker's students”, “economists going to tech”, and then “public policy”. But another one I'm slowly picking at has to do with the wings of the profession that fall outside of the exclusively neoclassical tradition, one of which is Austrian economics. And Peter comes from that tradition, though he has mixed it with mainstream economics and made it into something of his own. So, with that being said, let me now turn you over to the podcast! Thanks again for tuning in!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest on the Mixtape with Scott is famed labor economist, Richard Blundell, the David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at the University of College at London. Dr. Blundell's accolades are extensive: a Fellow of the Econometric Association, Fell of the American Academy of Arts and Science, former President of SOLE, of the Royal economic Society, recipient of the 2000 Frisch Prize, the 2020 Jacob Mincer Prize in Labor Economics, and on and on. You can find more information about his background here at this short biography. But ironically, it was for a different reason that I wanted to reach out to him. I was interested in reaching out to Dr. Blundell because of some research I had been doing on the history of difference-in-differences and throughout the 1990s, I kept coming back to him. He had several things he wrote in the 1990s that left me with the distinct impression that he was attempting to educate others about the bridging of causal inference and natural experiment methodologies, so I was just curious to learn more about him. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did! Thank you again for all your support! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! Due to a technical difficulty with my producer's computer, this week's interview was not ready in time. So we are going to do another repeat from season one. This is with Petra Todd, a labor economist, econometrician and author of a new book on causal inference entitled, Impact Evaluation in International Development with Paul Glewwe. She was also elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences last 2023. And she is Jim Heckman's former student and coauthor, which fits with my slowly building deck of interviews on “Heckman's students” (along with John Cawley and Chris Taber). But I also just loved this interview and so it's also nice just to repost it. Plus, it's probably nice I think to give people some breathing room given the pace at which these come out. Next week, though, I should be back on track with new episodes. Thanks again for tuning in!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

I'm still recovering from my travels over spring break, so I decided to repost an old interview I did in August 2022. This was my 27th podcast interview at the time and part of my “Economists in Tech” series, which has died down somewhat. The guest was Kyle Kretschman whose title at Spotify reads “Head of Economics”. This was a popular interview when it first came out, and I thought for newer listeners, they might like to listen to it again. Kyle came to Spotify after spending around 6-7 years at Amazon first. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a PhD in economics in 2011. PhD economists going into tech in the early teens was really just at the beginning — the flow and the stock was much smaller than it is now. So it was really interesting to listen to Kyle's story about that move away from academia into tech when it was not quite as common a story as it is now. And I think the story really resonated with a lot of people, in general, when it first came out so I thought I'd share it again. Here's a Q&A that UT Austin did with him in December 2022 if you want to read more of his story there too. Thanks again for tuning in!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest on the Mixtape is Pierre Chiappori, a micro theorist at Columbia University. While Pierre is not technically a student of Gary Becker's, there are many people who counted Becker as a colleague that probably at times did consider them also Becker's student, and I suspect Pierre is one such person. I learned of Dr. Chiappori in graduate school while studying economics of the family. His collective models of the household always seemed a little bit outside of what I was studying, which was typically the Nash bargaining models of marriage, but I was also very interested too. It's a run of papers he did in the 1990s, overlapping with when he was at Chicago with Becker, that sort of was the catalyst to ask him on the show. When I learned that he grew up in Monaco under the shadow of Princess Grace Kelly, and that he like me also loved Rear Window, I knew it was going to be an interesting talk. I hope you all enjoy it. Remember, the story of economics has been tributaries, many eddies, and listening all of them is in my opinion a way to show consideration to those people where consideration is nothing more than allowing their story to become real to us. I continue to believe that it is in the act of listening to stories that we are transformed and learn our own way. So I encourage you to listen closely to the story of Dr. Pierre Chiappori. Oh and this is our 87th interview. 13 more and we hit 100! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott. One of the new themes I'm hoping to pursue is the students of the 2021 winners of the Nobel Prize. And today's interview is with Marianne Bitler, professor of economics at University of California Davis. Dr. Bitler was in the first cohort of Josh Angrist's PhD advisees at MIT. She graduated in 1998 from MIT where Angrist was one of her advisors before going into a career in government. She took the long way to get into academia, moving through UC Irvine and landing at UC Davis. Her career has been marked by an interest in means tested poverty programs as well as reproductive health, but it's also been marked by early interest in heterogenous treatment effects from a methodological perspective, making her contributions some of the earlier work that I think highlights some of the challenges we face when focusing exclusively on means. It was a pleasure talking to Marianne and I hope all of you find this as interesting to listen to as I did. Thanks again for tuning in!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to season three of the Mixtape with Scott — a podcast devoted to listening to the stories of living economists and creating an oral history of the last 50 years of the profession. This week's interview is with Wilbert van der Klaauw, economic research advisor in the Household and Public Policy Research Division and the director of the Center for Microeconomic Data with the New York Fed. Wilbert has an interesting story for many reasons. He fits with my longstanding interest in causal inference for his early work on regression discontinuity design, both alone and with Hahn and Todd in their 2001 Econometrica. But I also wanted to hear his story because of his decision to leave academia as a full professor at UNC Chapel Hill to work at the Federal Reserve. (Which again brings to mind that part of the story of the profession is the Federal Reserve itself but that's for another day). So it was a real interesting experience to get to talk with Wilbert and hear more about his life coming from the Netherlands to study at Erasmus, where he met a young Guido Imbens — a detail I didn't know about either — and studied econometrics as his undergraduate major (a major I also didn't know existed apart from economics). So I hope you enjoy this interview! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! A podcast devoted to the personal stories of living economists and relaying an oral history of the profession (or at least a selected oral history of a selected part of the profession). Still working on an easy to say phrase that combines those two ideas of the micro and the macro. Anyway, today is part of the longer series on econometricians, and I am pleased to have on the show Bruce Hansen, the Mary Claire Aschenbrener Phipps Distinguished Chair and the Trygve Haavelmo Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. Bruce has been a prolific and highly impactful econometrician for decades now, as well as the author of two new books. The first is an econometrics textbook that all of you should check out, especially if you're teaching econometrics and especially if you're taking econometrics, and especially if you're wanting to learn more econometrics. So I guess that's to say, especially if you are interested in what I do on this substack. The second book is a book on probability and statistics and I would say that book also is for those three groups of people, but also add to it people who teach probability and statistics and want to have a stronger background in this subjects. For years, Bruce provided both books for free on his website, and it was a real inspiration for me to do the same with my book. Bruce and I discussed a lot about his career, including the large changes that happened in econometrics starting in the 1990s and early 2000s, which he suggested was monumental in a lot of ways. I won't spoil it. So thank you for tuning in and I hope you enjoy today's interview as much as I did!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week's guest on the Mixtape with Scott is Christopher Taber. Chris is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin where he is department chair, the James Heckman professor of economics and the Walker Family chair. Chris is a labor economist and econometrician who has made numerous contributions to both areas such as the returns to education, difference-in-differences with small numbers of interventions, techniques for evaluating claims of selection on observables and more. In addition to fitting into my long running interest in econometrics and labor economics, though, I wanted to talk with Chris because this year I'm wanting to interview more “the students of [BLANK].” And Chris was Jim Heckman's student as a grad student at the University of Chicago and this year in addition to interviewing the students of Orley, Card, Angrist and Imbens, I am also want to interview the students of Jim Heckman as I continue to flesh out the causal inference revolution that began in labor economics in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s at Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Chicago and Berkeley. Thanks for tuning in! I hope you enjoy this chance to listen to Chris's story as much as I did.Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to another episode of the Mixtape with Scott! This week I have a guest who some of you know, and some of you don't know (I suppose making them no different than anyone else) — Andrew Baker. Andrew is now an assistant professor in the law school at the University of California Berkeley. He specializes in topics at the intersection of law, policy and finance. And one of his papers, “How Much Should We Trust Staggered Difference-In-Differences Estimates?”, published in the Journal of Financial Economics, was the winner of the Jensen Prize for the best paper published in Corporate Finance. He is for many people permanently part of the last five year's or so “credibility crisis in difference-in-differences” for both this paper, as well as other things he's written and done. So I thought it would be great to have him on the show as part of the larger material on causal inference in economics. But Andrew is not an economist. He has a joint JD/PHD from Stanford, but the PhD is in Business Administration with a special focus on accounting. I nonetheless included him in this series as part of the “story of economics” because like Carlos Celinni last week's guest, Andrew started out in economics as an undergraduate at Georgetown, then went to work for an economic consulting firm, then did a predoc with John Donohue III, professor of law at Stanford and PhD economist from Yale. But then he instead went into Stanford's law school before migrating into their doctoral program in business administration. And I thought this kind of story — the story of people staying in, but also of people exiting — is really a part of the larger economics story too. It's still somewhat challenging to find these stories, so I'm going to keep trying, but I wanted to if I could by circling people who I knew it applied to. But, as with others, the point of Andrew being a guest on the show is simply because I think he does have an interesting story, and I wanted to hear it. I hope others of you hear it too. Thanks again for tuning into the podcast. Please like share etc!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Philosophy of the PodcastWelcome to the Mixtape with Scott, a podcast devoted to hearing the stories of living economists and a non-randomly selected oral history of the economics profession of the last 50 years. Before I introduce this week's guest, I wanted to start off with a quote from a book I'm reading that explains the philosophy of the podcast. “For the large m majority of people, hearing others' stories enables them to see their own experiences in a new, truthful light. They realize — usually instantaneously — that a story another has told is their own story, only with different details. This realization seems to sneak past their defenses. There is something almost irresistible about another person's facing and honoring the truth, without fanfare of any kind, but with courage and clarity and assurance. The other participants feel invited, even emboldened, to stand unflinching before the truth themselves. By opening ourselves even a little to the remarkable spectacle of other people reconsidering their lives, we begin to reconsider our own.” — Terry Warner, Bonds That Make Us FreeThe purpose of the podcast is not to tell the story of living economists. The purpose of the podcast is to hear the stories of living economists as they themselves tell it. It is to make an effort to without judgment just pay attention to the life lived of another person and not make them some non-playable character in the video game of our life. To immature people, others are not real, and the purpose of the podcast is, if for no one else, to listen to people so that they become real, and in that process of listening, for me to be changed.They may sound heavy or it may sound even a little silly. After all, isn't this first and foremost a conversation between two economists? But economists are people first, and the thing I just said is for people. And let's be frank — aren't man of us feeling, at least some of the time, alone in our work? And isn't, at least some of the time, the case that our work is all consuming? I think there are people in my family who still don't understand what my job is as a professor at a university, let alone what my actual research is about. There are colleagues like that too. Many of us are in departments where we may be the only ones in our field, and many of us are studying topics where our networks are thin. And so loneliness is very common. It is common for professors, it is common for students, it is common for people in industry, it is common for people non-profits and it is common for people in government. It is common for people in between jobs. And while the purpose of the podcast is not to alleviate loneliness, as that most likely is only something a person can do for themselves, the purpose is to share in the stories of other people on the hypothesis that that is a gift we give those whose stories we listen to, but it's also maybe moreso the gift we give the deepest part of ourselves. Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Carlos Cinelli, PhD Statistics, University of Washington's Statistics DepartmentSo, with that said, let me introduce this week's guest. Carlos Cinelli may seem like a guest who does not quite fit, but his is the story of the economics profession in a couple of ways. First, he is someone who left economics. Carlos was an undergraduate major in economics who then did a masters in economics and after doing so left economics (and econometrics) to become a statistician. The leaving of economics is not the road less traveled. By talking to Carlos, and hearing his story, the hope is that the survivor bias of the podcast guests might be weakened if only a tad bit. But Carlos also fits into one of the broader themes of the podcast which is causal inference. Carlos studied at UCLA under two notable figures in the history of econometrics and causal inference: Ed Leamer in the economics department and Judea Pearl in the computer science department. And Carlos is now an assistant professor at University of Washington in the statistics department whose work consistently moved into domains of relevance in economics, such as his work in the linear of econometric theory and practice by Chris Taber, Emily Oster and others. That work is important and concerns sensitivity analysis with omitted variable bias. And he has also written an excellent paper with Judea Pearl and Andrew Forney detailing precisely the kinds of covariates we should be contemplating when trying to address the claims of unconfoundedness. So without further ado, I will turn it over to Carlos. Thank you again for your support of the podcast. Please like, share and follow!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

The Mixtape with Scott is a weekly podcast devoted to building out a selected part of the collective story of the last 50 years of the economics profession by listening to the personal stories of living economists. And this week's guest is a the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics at Middlebury College in Vermont, Caitlin Myers who I am fortunate to count as both a coauthor and friend, as well as an professional admirer. Caitlin is a graduate of the University of Texas's economics department and is one of those young economists who hit the ground running and has only gotten faster. A senior economist told me recently she is *the* abortion researcher at this moment in time having made major contributions to both the scientific record and the policy discussion regarding abortion policy, its causes and its consequences. She is as far as economists go meticulous, thoughtful, passionate, principled and creative, and while she is not directly a student of Gary Becker, or Claudia Goldin for that matter, she is very clearly part of their influence on labor economics and on Caitlin in turn. Thank you again for tuning in to the podcast. If you like it, please share, follow and all that.Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to season 3 of The Mixtape with Scott! A podcast about the personal stories of economists and the collective story of economics of the last 50 years. We are kicking off season 3 with a bang: an interview with the distinguished labor economist, Richard Freeman, from Harvard University. Dr. Freeman holds is the Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and serves as the Co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. As you'll learn, his educational journey started with a B.A. from Dartmouth in 1964 and went into a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University which he competed in 1969.Freeman's work has been pivotal in reshaping perspectives on labor economics and industrial relations. His book "What Do Unions Do?" co-authored with James Medoff in 1984, challenged prevailing economic views by suggesting that unionism could enhance social efficiency. This groundbreaking work has been supported by subsequent studies, highlighting the positive impact of unions on productivity in various fields. Freeman has also made significant contributions to understanding the internationalization of science, the dynamics of the scientific workforce, and the implications of an overeducated American labor market.This was a super fun and at times funny interview, and I hope you like listening to it as much as I had being in it. Thanks again for tuning in! Don't forget to like, share, follow, etc.! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

And with that, season 2 of the Mixtape with Scott is complete! What a journey! Our final guest this year is an econometrician named Christine Pinto. Christine is an econometrician at INSPER Institute of Education and Research in São Paolo Brazil. And I know of Christine because of her work on synthetic control making her fit with my larger interest in causal inference. But ironically, Christine also was briefly a Guido Imbens student at Berkeley before he left, which makes her also part of the story of how causal inference spread through labor markets and not merely textbooks. It was a delight getting to talk to Christine and I hope you find this interview as enjoyable as I did. Thank you again for all your support these last two years. I have thoroughly enjoyed this journey throughout the world, hearing the stories of living economists, and helping broadcast them for whoever else out there that needs and wants to hear them. I hope all of you can leave behind the things that are no longer needed from 2023 and take only with you those things into 2024 that are essential. Best of luck to all you of you. Peace.Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe