The Mixtape with Scott

This week I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Anna Aizer , professor of economics at Brown University and editor-in-chief at the Journal of Human Resources. I am a long time admirer of Dr. Aizer’s work and have followed her career with curiosity for a long time. Some of her papers imprinted pretty strongly on me. I’ll just briefly mention one. Her 2015 article in the prestigious Quarterly Journ...

Ronny Kohavi, PhD “Economists in tech” is a podcast series of mine trying to tell the story of the movement predominantly Economics PhD talent into and throughout the emerging tech sector. Previously interviews have been with Michael Schwarz (Microsoft), Susan Athey (Stanford, now DOJ, formerly Microsoft), and John List (Chicago, Wal-mart). But this week I chose to share an interview I did a month...

Anna Stansbury is a professor at MIT's Work and Organization Studies department. I interviewed her as part of my "economics and public policy" mixtape series. We discussed her growing up in England, and what drew her to economics, as well as her thoughts about labor market trends and other stylized facts and what she thinks they mean. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did! Get full access to Scot...

Robert Michael, professor emeritus at University of Chicago, was a student of Nobel laureate Gary Becker from a productive period when Becker was at Columbia up through the late 1960s and in this interview shares a bit of why that time was so special. As you may recall, I have been doing my only little “mixtape” about Becker’s students and previously interviewed Bob’s old classmate and longtime fr...

In this episode, I introduce listeners to Michael Grossman, an early pioneer in the field of health economics. His dissertation work under at Columbia University on "health capital and demand" became a cornerstone of the modern field of health economics. We discuss his time growing up in New York, his time with Gary Becker at Columbia as his student, how he got into health in the first place, and...

In this week's episode of Mixtape the Podcast, I interview Mark Anderson, a health economist at Montana State University. We discuss his time growing up in Montana, his brief stint at Stanford playing football, how he got into economics, cannabis reform, public health at the turn of the 20th century, and the joys of hand collecting data. We also discuss a new course he is teaching for young facult...

In this week's episode of the Mixtape podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Katy Graddy. Dr. Graddy is a professor of economics and dean of the international business school at Brandeis. She also did her PhD in economics at Princeton in the mid-1990s where as I see it design-based causal inference has its start and is gaining influence. We discussed the joys of collecting data and using...

In this week's episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, I have the pleasure of interviewing one of my truly favorite people I've met and learned from, Alvin Roth. Alvin Roth is the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and professor of economics at Stanford University. He is a widely regarded and extremely innovative game theorist who uses game theory not only to understand the world but to improve...

In this interview, I had the opportunity to talk with a wonderful man, Alan Manning. Dr. Manning is a professor of economics at London School of Economics. He is a labor economist's labor economist. He has beat the steady drum of careful empirical work thinking hard about the welfare of workers and to evaluate the presence that market composition has on their overall well being. We discussed a new...

In this interview, I talk with the esteemed economist, Susan Athey, a professor of economics at Stanford University and a recently elected President of the American Economics Association. She was one of a handful of micro theorist pioneers, like Hal Varian to Google and Preston McAfee to Yahoo, who in the early 2000s traveled from academia to work for large technology firms to work on market desig...

In this week’s podcast, I had a great time talking with Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, the Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and founder of several firms specializing in data analytics and education. As a scientist, he has made major contributions to the fields of statistics and political science, but more than that, he is also jus...

In this episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, I interviewed Petra Todd, professor of economics at University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Todd is a widely regarded and highly influential applied and theoretical econometrician who has written across many topics ranging from developing tests for evaluating racial discrimination in motor vehicle searches, to analysis of large conditional cash transfers (PROGRESA)...

Michael Schwarz leads economics at Microsoft as Corporate Vice President and Chief Economist. A former professor at Harvard, Michael became an early pioneer in tech as part of a larger trend of top PhD economists moving into industry to work on a variety of real world topics related to market design and causal inference. In this interview, we discuss some of his ground breaking work in micro theor...

In this interview, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Elizabeth Popp Berman, Associate Professor of Organizational Studies at University of Michigan. We spoke about her new book, "Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" recently published by Princeton University Press, and her career as a sociologist. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at c...

In this week’s episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing longterm editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Larry Katz. Dr. Katz is a distinguished labor economist and a pillar in the profession as editor of the more impactful and influential journal in our science. He has written a number of classic studies in labor economics ranging from topics like skill based chan...

Peter Hull is young econometrician at Brown University who writes about a variety of applied topics such as education, labor and criminal justice. Most of his work manages to simultaneously reveal something new about a phenomena while also extending our methodological understanding of causal inference. In this episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, Peter and I talk about growing up in Maine as a child s...

Guido Imbens is the Applied Econometrics Professor at Stanford University's economics department and business school, as well as a co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the local average treatment effect and instrumental variables in his 1990s era work with Josh Angrist. In this interview we discuss that time in his life, his influences, his career and collaborations ov...

In this 8th episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, I interviewed Sandy Darity, the Samuel DuBois Professor of Public Policy at Duke’s Sanford School and pioneer in a framework within economics called "stratification economics". Stratification economics focuses on the determinants of group-level inequality rooted in group identity, relative position within society, and historic inequalities that compound...

Episode 7 of Mixtape: the Podcast. I interview Josh Angrist, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics, Ford professor of economics at MIT, and director of the MIT Blueprint Labs. In this interview, we discuss a range of topics such as being bored and aimless as a young man, his time in the Israeli army as a paratrooper, his time at the 1980s Princeton Industrial Labor Relations group, his colla...

Orley Ashenfelter is arguably the founding father of one of the most influential empirical movements in the modern era -- the so-called credibility revolution. He was the adviser to two Nobel laureates (Josh Angrist and David Card), and guided the Princeton Industrial Relations group for years. Arguably if not one of the most important labor economists of his generation, then at least one of the s...

When I think of the economics of the minimum wage, I think of Ted Lasso season 2 when we learn of a pretend new book by Brené Brown, "Enter the Arena, But Bring a Knife". The economics of minimum wage is not for the faint of heart as the question of its effect, both in theory and in reality, has been debated fiercely by extraordinarily competent labor economists for decades, and I don't see it end...

A panic attack spread across empirical social science fields like economics from 2008 to 2022 as a result of a half dozen econometrics articles analyzing the most popular non-experimental methods in causal inference -- the difference-in-differences design. The reason? The way researchers had been used it probably wasn't right because they'd been using the wrong tools to do it. One of those econome...

Alberto Abadie is the creator of one of the most important innovation in causal inference of the last 20 years -- the synthetic control method. Published in 2003, Abadie's model identifies causal effects of broad social interventions when experimentation is practically impossible. He tells the story about how he became interested in terrorism, which was the impetus of the creation of the method in...

Steve Tadelis is an interesting bird: Harvard PhD applied microeconomics theorist turned experimentalist, he spent some time at eBay as a Distinguished Scientist where he made some interesting discoveries about the effectiveness (or not) of paid search advertising, a key part of search engine giants like Google's underlying business model. In this interview with Steve, we learn about that research...

Scott Cunningham, professor of economics at Baylor University and author of Causal Inference: the Mixtape, interviews John List, professor of economics at University of Chicago, chief economist at Walmart (formerly Lyft and Uber Chief Economist), and author of THE VOLTAGE EFFECT about his life and career as an economist inside and outside academia, as well as the distinction between scientific wor...