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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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. ...

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...

Philosophy of the Podcast Welcome 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...

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...

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...

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...

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! This week is a blast. I’m talking this week Dr. Marianne Wanamaker, professor of economics at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and the new dean at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy. Marianne has had a spectacular run since graduating from Northwestern in 2009: NBER, IZA, a stint in the White House (former chief domestic economist at Council of Economic Advisors and senior labor economist), a ton of other stuff. She’s an economic...

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape, I’m Scott Cunningham, the host. We are in the final stretch! Season two is almost over. When it’s all said and done, there’ll be 45 episodes in season two, and 34 from season which is [does math on a piece paper, scratches it out, starts over, then announces] 79 episodes. Man, what a fun this has been. Today’s interview is with Dr. Jinyong Hahn, the chair of the economics department at University of California Los Angeles and a prominent...

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! I’m the host - Scott Cunningham. As some of you have probably seen, I’ve been studying a paper on OLS entitled “Interpreting OLS Estimands When Treatment Effects Are Heterogeneous: Smaller Groups Get Larger Weights” by Tymon Słocyński at Brandeis University. It’s been an interesting paper because of what it taught me about a model I thought was done teaching me. Well this week I am interviewing Tymon, who is a young econometrician...

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 I have loved all of them, but I have a deep love and appreciation for Guido and thought if I...

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 very interesting lab called the Creative Destruction lab that among other things specializes in...