The Mixtape with Scott

Interview with Jason Furman It has been a common story throughout the last two seasons that while not every economist entered economics with a burning desire to affect public policy, a large number had. But of those that had said that usually had in mind scholarship as the primary mechanism by which policy was affected. In this week’s episode, I am joined by an economist who has spent his career v...

Derek Neal interview It’s Tuesday which is usually the day of the week I release a new episode for season two of the Mixtape with Scott. These interviews consist of me interviewing an economist, though sometimes I deviate and interview other social scientists or authors. The idea of the podcast is a little out there: “to be an oral history of the economics profession, focusing selectively on topic...

In this week’s interview on The Mixtape with Scott , I had the opportunity to meet with the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science at Princeton University, Dr. Rocío Titiunik. Within the world of applied econometric methodology, Dr. Titiunik is well known for her theoretical work on regression discontinuity design. Her work with coauthors like Sebastian Calonico, Matias Cattaneo, and Max...

In this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott, I’m taking a break from interviewing economists to post a podcast interview with a non-economist, the historian Mike Jay . Mike Jay is a historian of medicine and I interviewed him last year as part of a now somewhat defunct project on the emerging medical reforms in the US and around the world related to "psychedelic medications". I felt that as t...

Podcast interview I’m going to drop this week’s podcast a day early because Dr. Abadie’s doing a workshop for Mixtape Sessions later this week, and thought it would be better to just give everyone a headsup about it and bundle it with this interview too. Dr. Abadie has had a major influence on me. In 2009, I began studying the legalization of indoor sex work on public health and violence against w...

Hello Substack readers, I'm excited to share with you the insights from my latest podcast episode, where I had the incredible opportunity to interview Yale professor and renowned economist Steven Berry. In this week's edition, we will: * Introduce you to our esteemed guest, Steven Berry * Delve into the groundbreaking BLP model * Recap the fascinating conversation we had Meet Steven Berry Steven B...

Dear Mixtape with Scott listeners, We are pleased to announce the release of our latest podcast episode, featuring an insightful conversation with Jon Roth , an exceptionally talented young econometrician from Brown University. With only three years since graduating, Jon has already made significant contributions to the field of econometrics, publishing high-profile papers on difference-in-differe...

This week’s episode is an interview with Joseph Doyle . Joe is the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management and Applied Economics  at the MIT Sloan School of Management who has had a distinguished career as a labor economist studying a range of topics that most outside of economics do not always associate with the field — like child welfare and foster care, juvenile incarceration and its effect on...

In this week’s podcast episode, The Mixtape with Scott, I am interviewing Paul Oyer . Paul Oyer is a labor economist at Stanford University and author of several books, including " Everything I Needed to Know about Economics I learned from Online Dating ", which is one of my favorite "popular general interest books explaining what economics is", as well as " An Economist Goes to the Game " which i...

In this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott, I interviewed Mike Luca , the Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Mike studies a variety of topics of high relevance to the underlying economic organization of the online sector, such as the design of online platforms, applied causal inference and data science. More to the point, his rese...

What a pleasure it is this week to introduce my guest on the Mixtape with Scott, Dr. Pedro Sant’Anna . Had you asked me a few years ago the likelihood I’d make such a good new friend this late in life, I would not have guessed it, but from countless conversations on social media, and even more in DM on our Slack channel with two other close friends, Pedro Sant’Anna has become one of my favorite pe...

This week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott is a little out of order. Season two’s episodes are going to be a little out of order, based on what feels like the best next episode to present at that time. So I decided after doing my interview with University of Arizona professor of economics, Hide Ichimura, that I wanted to release it because I had such a delightful time talking with him. Dr. Ichi...

In this week’s interview on the Mixtape with Scott, I had the pleasure of interviewing Clair Brown, a labor economist at the University of California - Berkeley. Dr. Brown’s career has spanned several topics like discrimination, industrial economics, and climate. Dr. Brown’s late career has made several turns into environmental economics, particularly climate, but also a re-envisioning of the fiel...

Time for a new podcast episode! In this week’s episode, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Beatrice Cherrier , a widely recognized expert in the history of economic thought, and one of my personal favorite economists around. Beatrice is an associate professor of economics at the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics in France. She is a font of wisdom and insight about more part...

In this week’s episode of The Mixtape with Scott, I introduce you to the one and only, Dan Hamermesh . Dan is professor emeritus now at the University of Texas where he spent the last part of his career. He’s part of the story of Princeton that I’ve been interested in telling, as he was there from 1969 to 1973 before heading to Michigan State where he was until 1993. He then went down the street f...

Season two of the Mixtape with Scott is up and boy do I have a dynamite first guest. None other than the man himself, Dr. Jeffrey Wooldridge ! Jeff, as I say in the opening, is the author of two phenomenally popular books ( here , here and here’s the solutions ) in econometrics that has raised an entire generation of economists. We have a great conversation about his life and career and I hope you...

My guest this week on the podcast is Phillip Levine , the Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. I’ve only personally met Phil once — at a conference on the family many years ago and just briefly. But I have been a huge admirer of him for many reasons for a long time, ever since graduate school, and I wanted to interview him for a lot of...

Chris Nosko is a PhD economist. He did his PhD in economics at Harvard in the mid 2010s before going to Chicago Booth take a job as an assistant professor. But for a year prior to taking that job, between Harvard and Chicago, he did a postdoc fellowship at eBay where he, Thomas Blake and Steve Tadelis met and worked together on a project involved a serendipitous event at the company in which eBay...

** THE EARLIER PODCAST WAS MISSING TEN MINUTES SO I HAD TO REPOST ** Brigham Frandsen is a professor at BYU’s economics program. He did his undergrad at BYU double majoring in physics and economics where he coauthored two articles — one in physics on lasers, one on the distribution of income with his professor, the famed James McDonald. In this interview, we discuss a lot of things about his life,...

Background stuff about causal inference Josh Angrist once quipped (on my podcast!) that a paper he wishes he had written was written by his classmate, Bob LaLonde. It was LaLonde’s job market paper, later published in the AER , that arguably helped bring to broader attention some of the empirical problems around causal inference within applied labor at the time. It was very ingenious too. LaLonde...

Shoshana Grossbard, Economist, Professor, Editor, Becker’s Student I recently volunteered to teach a new class on the history of economic thought and it has been profoundly rewarding for me. I love economics but I also love the stories of its players, my tribe, the economists. This person critiquing that person, this idea twisting around that other persons idea. The idea I might get paid to study...

From the earliest days of economics as a formal science, economists have been trying to understand the causes of the wealth of nations . In the field of development economics, the introduction of the randomized controlled trial has become an important tool in the broader toolbox of economists for trying to understand the many things that may cause the improvement of human welfare in lower income c...

Who is Leah Boustan? Leah Boustan is a professor of economics at Princeton University and this week’s guest on The Mixtape with Scott. Her research has to date largely focused on two of the largest demographic events in US history: the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to industrial cities in the North and West in the mid-twentieth century, and a period of mass migration fr...

In this week’s episode of The Mixtape with Scott, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kyle Kretschman , Head of Economics at Spotify. It was a great opportunity for me because Kyle is one of the first economists I have spoken to who didn’t enter tech as a senior economist (e.g., John List, Susan Athey, Michael Schwarz, Steve Tadelis). Kyle entered tech straight out of graduate school. He spent much...

I first met Peter Arcidiacano , professor of economics at Duke University, while I was a PhD student at the University of Georgia and I have followed his work since from a distance. I originally followed Peters work because he’d written several articles about sex from a two-sided matching perspective. I was struck by the fact that we both saw thinking about sexual relationships in terms of a match...