UChicago Economics Events and Conversations

The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI), the Chicago Economics Society (CES), and the Booth Alumni Club of Washington, DC, welcomed Chang-Tai Hsieh, Phyllis and Irwin Winkelried Professor Of Economics, Chicago Booth School of Business, for cocktails and a conversation on Crony Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. David Rank, former Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge’ d’Affaires at th...

When faced with debt across multiple credit cards, do people pay down their balances in a way that makes financial sense? On February 1, BFI hosted Chicago Booth Professor Neale Mahoney for a Friedman Forum luncheon lecture on his recent working paper, “How Do Individuals Repay Their Debt? The Balance-Matching Heuristic.” In the paper, Professor Mahoney and his colleagues examine how credit card h...

Traditional economics assumes rational actors. In daily decision-making, however, we all make decisions influenced by our biases and beliefs, whether which car to buy or who to vote for at the polls. As a result, outcomes often deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economics. Combining discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of economics – including incentives...

Chicago Booth Professor Steve Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, discussed modern data science techniques at BFI's latest Becker Brown Bag talk.

In this episode, Murphy talks with Nancy Stokey, The Frederick Henry Prince Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, about the transformative effects that technology has on economies.

Richard Evans is a Senior Fellow in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago, and Fellow here at the institute. Evans sees immense potential in the methods, practices, and even workflows that computer engineers have implemented in their own discipline, and is working to bring those skills into Chicago economics through his role both here at the institute and via the Masters in Com...

Edward P. Lazear is a labor economist and a founder of the field known as personnel economics. His research centers on employee incentives, promotions, compensation and productivity in firms. In this episode, Lazear and Kevin Murphy talk about the legacy of human capital and labor economics at the University of Chicago, as well Lazear’s experience crossing from academia to the Council of Economic...

Amanda Agan is interested in the ways that laws and regulations play out in the real world, often yielding unintended consequences. She visited the institute this spring and spoke about her recent work to evaluate policies that eliminate questions about previous criminal convictions from job applications Advocates of these “Ban the Box” policies have argued that these laws could increase employmen...

In this episode, Kevin Murphy talks with Casey Mulligan, professor in economics at the University of Chicago. Mulligan examines microeconomic trends, including labor, through a macroeconomic lens, with a particular interest in how policy can inadvertently shape the labor market in unexpected ways.

Manasi Deshpande is an emerging expert in how social insurance programs shape the outcomes of their recipients. In this episode, she and Kevin Murphy discuss the importance of empirical measurement of such programs over a lifetime and how those effects shape the recipients' labor response. The pair talk about the ways that economists bring a unique framework to public policy in order to better mea...

In this episode, Murphy gets concrete with Chad Syverson, the J. Baum Harris Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth, about how his engineering background influences his approach to economics, understanding the drivers of productivity, how it is measured, and what can be gleaned from past growth trends in predicting what may come.

In this episode, Murphy and Muhammad Akbarpour, a Becker Friedman Institute Research Fellow, examine the opportunities that surround the development of an international kidney exchange market, the obstacles that inhibit that market from being implemented, and the experience of being an early career scholar at the University of Chicago.

In this episode, Murphy talks with Steven Davis, William H. Abbott Professor of International Business and Economics at Chicago Booth, explore labor market trends from the employer side and talk about how uncertainty over impending government policy and regulatory shifts can influence labor market trends and job creation.

In this episode, Murphy and James Heckman, Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, delve into the topic of human capital, focusing on how both education and early home life play a defining role in the development of a child, and talk about how the economics toolkit is influencing the work of social scientists outside the discipline.

In this episode, Murphy talks with Erik Hurst, V. Duane Rath Professor of Economics and the John E. Jeuck Faculty Fellow at Chicago Booth, to explore Hurst's perspective on the possible common ground between macro- and micro- economic perspectives and to evaluate labor market trends from the early 2000s leading up to today on the employee side of the manufacturing and housing industries.

In this episode, Murphy and José Scheinkman, a former UChicago faculty member and department chair now at Columbia University and Princeton University, elaborate on the experience of being an economist at the University of Chicago, evaluate recent trends in the global economy, and highlight ways in which economic thinking can more broadly be applied to a wide range of problems and solutions.

In this episode, Murphy talks with Benjamin Brooks, a Becker Friedman Institute Research Fellow, about what drew Brooks to economics as his field of research, the nuances of understanding game theory, and the role of the Becker Friedman Institute in enriching the study of economics at the University of Chicago.

In this episode, we speak with Manasi Deshpande, who currently works at the Institute as a postdoctoral research fellow leading up to joining the UChicago Economics Department as an assistant professor in the fall of 2016. Deshpande’s research interests include the effects of social insurance and public assistance programs on consumption, health, and well being, and the interaction between these p...

In today’s episode we talk with Ben Brooks, a research fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute interested in how incomplete information complicates classical game theory. This summer, Brooks organized a conference, bringing together experts in mathematical modeling, incomplete information and game theory. Researchers highlighted important developments in modeling information in auctions and contin...

In this episode, we speak with David Weisbach and Jennifer Nou of the University of Chicago Law School, as well as Alan Sanstad of the Computation Institute and The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. The trio of researchers organized a conference in April 2015 centered on a persistent issues for federal institutions: when making regulations and rules, how should policymakers acc...

John Taylor and Harald Uhlig recount a recent series of conference aimed at codifying the most important principles guiding modern macroeconomic analysis. Music is by Boris Mann 2, whom you can listen to on Soundcloud. Licensed under Creative Commons.