The Mixtape with Scott

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! I’m the host, Scott Cunningham. This week I decided to do a rerun from season one to give people a little time to catch their breath as I know at one interviewee a week can be like drinking from a firehose. This is an interview I did with Guido Imbens, the co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics. I am hard pressed to say I have a favorite interview, as...

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! This week we have an outstanding guest named Avi Goldfarb of the University of Toronto. Avi is a PhD economist who graduated from Northwestern in the early 2000s specializing in the economics of the internet. He is now at the University of Toronto where he is a professor in the marketing department as well as chief data scientist with a ver...

This week on the Mixtape with Scott, I have a very special guest. Adam Smith, the so-called founder of economics, and author of two best selling books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1759 and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ( buy it now for $2800 here at eBay !) published in 1776. I know what you’re thinking. “But Scott, that would make Adam Smith very o...

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott episode 38 of season 2! By my calculations, there have been 72 total episodes in the Mixtape with Scott podcast — 34 episodes in season 1, 38 this year. What better way to celebrate episode 72 (38) than with Dr. Andreu Mas-Colell from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain! If you’re an economist, then you know Dr. Mas-Colell if for no other reason than that...

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Recently, the University of Chicago Press published a book entitled The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker . It was written obviously by Gary Becker who died almost 10 years ago at the age of 83 after an extremely long and fruitful career as an economist. Dr. Becker had many students — some like me were students from...

This week’s guest on The Mixtape with Scott is the Xiaokai Yang Chair of Business and Economics at Monash University, Sascha Becker . Sascha is an economist who is hard to pin down into just one field. He’s probably most widely known, across the most general set of economists, as a contemporary economic historian. One of his specializations within economic history has been religion, most notably t...

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! This week's episode has a guest that some of you have come to know and appreciate, and some of you hopefully will after this episode — Andrew Goodman-Bacon (“Bacon”). In addition to having a great nickname, he also has a great job, a great personality and several great papers, one of which after only two years since publication has won an award at the Journal of...

Welcome to another episode of the Mixtape with Scott podcast! This week is a special one for the economics community as we celebrate Claudia Goldin's well-deserved Nobel Prize win for her pioneering work on women in the labor market. It's serendipitous, then, that today's guest is Melanie Guldi , associate professor of economics at University of Central Florida, who has spent over 15 years since g...

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott. I guess I could say “And I am your host Scott Cunningham” but after over 50 of these, I guess you already know I’m the host. When I first became interested in economics, it was through an old working paper series called the John M. Olin working paper series , which was then affiliated with the University of Chicago’s law school. That was wh...

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! I’m your host - Scott Cunningham, a professor at Baylor in their economics department. This week's guest is with none other than Amy Finkelstein, the John Bates Clark award and MacArthur Genius grant winner, and professor of economics at MIT. This was a fun interview — super generous, giving guest who shared a lot of her life, how she grew...

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott podcast! That feels strange typing since by now, I shouldn’t have to write it that way, but you never know — maybe someone is coming today for the first time and will be coming upon the second part of a two part interview with Nick Cox, a geographer at Durham in the UK, and longtime contributor to public and club goods around Stata, the software used by many econo...

Apologies I double posted a podcast this morning. I will finish the Nick Cox interview next week. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott — where we listen to the personal stories of economists and hope that what bubbles up in the long run is a curated collective story of the economics profession of the last 50 years. This week’s interview guest is part of my “Becker’s Students” s...

This week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott is with a professor at Durham in England in the geography department, Dr. Nick Cox. Many economists will only know of Nick because of his presence on the Stata listserv where he was one of its most prolific contributors and moderators. As economics as a field gradually shifted from theory to empirical work, at least as a share of the total papers writt...

Good morning! Welcome to another episode of the Mixtape with Scott! This week is a lot of fun. I got to interview none other than William Greene , Professor Emeritus at NYU and author of 8 editions of a great textbook on Econometrics , as well as a software developer from an econometrics software called LimDep . What a fun trip through the past — through growing up in Long Island, his family movin...

Welcome back to the Mixtape with Scott. I took a little break to let listeners breathe a little, but I’m back with my regular weekly uploads of new interviews with economists as part of my ongoing project (if that’s the right word) to listen to and relay the personal stories of economists and then let those stories then mount up and tell a collective story of the profession. Not “the story”, as th...

This week of the Mixtape with Scott, I have the pleasure of introducing you to Gábor Békés, an associate professor at Central European University in Austria and author of an exciting new textbook in data science and causal inference entitled Data Analysis for Business, Economics and Policy (Cambridge Press 2021) . I wanted to talk to Gábor for many reasons — one because I am interested in talking...

Update before introducing the podcast episode. Things have been light on the substack and I apologize for that. I spent two weeks traveling, seeing the country with my two high school aged daughters on a road trip from Waco, to Big Bend, to Marfa Texas, to the Grand Canyon. There at the Grand Canyon, I realized I was old and tired and it was hot and the girls gave it their best shot but sadly, the...

This week’s interview is with a professor at Brigham Young University named Joseph Price , or Joe. Joe is a professor who graduated from Cornell around the same time that I graduated from the University of Georgia (i.e., 2007 cohort). He’s a labor economist, Fellow at the Wheatley Institution, NBER research associate, Director of BYU’s Linking Lab, co-editor at Economics of Education Review and th...

This week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott is with a man I have gotten to become friends somewhat unexpectedly: Miles Kimball ( Wikipedia ). Miles is currently the Eugene D. Eaton Jr. professor in the economics department University of Colorado Boulder. And we got to know each other through a mutual friend, and discovered that we had many of the same somewhat eccentric interests around mental h...

This week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott is from 2019. It is an interview with the late Dr. William Spriggs, an economist who died in June 2023. He was a longtime professor of economics at Howard University and Chief Economist for the AFL-CIO. It was from an old series I wanted to do called “What Economists Do” — the premise being more or less what evolved into my current podcast: tell the st...

Three people were awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics: Josh Angrist, Guido Imbens and David (“Dave”) Card. I have interviewed the first two, and today I have the pleasure of posting the last interview with Dr. Card himself. To most economists, Dr. Card needs no introduction and to be honest I’m really not even sure what to say. I will just say that one time I was having dinner with a well kn...

Marina Della Guista is a pioneer in the economics of Sex Work who started her career at the University of Reading and is now a professor at the University of Turin. And when I first started studying sex work, I went looking for what papers economists had written. There weren’t many, but the ones that had been written were fascinating. Many, though not all, were applied theory papers. I remember wi...

This week’s episode of The Mixtape with Scott is an interview with an old professor of mine from when I was at the University of Georgia, Dr. George Selgin. George was one of several really interesting professors I was fortunate enough to get to know while a PhD student there. One anecdote of the impression he made on me was that he was a handful of people who ever read my dissertation. He gave ba...

On this week's episode of my podcast, The Mixtape with Scott, I got to meet and talk with the labor economist, Steve Pischke , a distinguished professor at the London School of Economics. Many listeners will automatically recognize that name for his joint venture with Josh Angrist in creating what is probably, without a doubt, the textbook of my generation in causal inference and applied micro eco...

A person I had always wanted to get to know Dr. Elizabeth Stuart , a professor at Johns Hopkins in their biostatistics department. I knew about her for a long time before I met her because of her expansive work on a variety of issues in the area of “matching” and unconfoundedness. She did her PhD, as it turned out, at Harvard at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s around the time when Guido Imben...