Welcome to the latest episode of the Mixtape with Scott. This week my guest is Tim Bartik from the Upjohn Institute. Let me briefly share some things about Tim. Many of you may know Tim from the shift-share instrument which oftentimes is referred to as Bartik instruments. That’s what I refer to it in a section of my book, for instance. It has been more carefully studied by econometricians over the last few years, such as Borusyak, Hull and Jaravel who have studied it from the shock side,...

Greetings everyone! The leaves on the tree are turning orange as we inch our way towards Halloween and some of us in some unbearably hot portions of the world get to finally see how the good half live and have a whisper of pleasant weather even if it will only be here for a second or two. This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is Miikka Rokkanen. Miikka is in Consumer Behavior Analytics at Amazon and is part of two of my larger series. First, he is part of my stories about the PhD...

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! It’s a pleasure to introduce this week’s guest from Stanford University, Maya Rossin-Slater. Maya is a health economist who specializes in areas related to families in particular. Early work of hers focused on public policies aimed at labor markets as an avenue for helping families, notably paid leave. Her work has been unique for focusing on all parts of the family — mothers, fathers, as well as children. Her more recent work has...

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! Sometimes the shortest distance between point A and point B is a straight line, but other times the shortest distance is a winding path. This week’s guest, Mohammad Akbarpour from Stanford University, is perhaps an example of the latter. Mohammad is a micro theorist at Stanford who specializes in networks, mechanism and design and two sided matching. Mohammad is an emerging young theorist at Stanford, student of such luminaries as Matt Jackson and Al Roth,...

Greetings! Today’s guest on the Mixtape needs no introduction, but I guess I will anyway. N. Greg Mankiw is a household name to many of us in economics. Either you are a macroeconomist, and his work in new Keynesian economics was something that you had come to know extremely well, or you are literally every other economist, and his principles of economics textbooks you know backwards and forwards because it was either the book you studied as a sophomore in college, or probably even more...

Welcome the Mixtape with Scott! This is a podcast with a simple objective: listen to the personal stories of living economists who are the primary guests I have on the show. The secondary goal is to follow a thread of people around topics I care about and allow a patchwork story of the profession to form based on, from and through those personal narratives. This is the 105th episode of the podcast, and the first episode of season four. Wow! Time flies. Today’s guest is name known to most...

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott, a podcast devoted to listening to the personal stories of living economists and creating an oral history of the profession. This episode is partly inspired by my visit to San Sebastián, Spain, with my daughter right now and partly inspired by a 2003 article co-authored with Alberto Abadie studying the effect of terrorism on economic growth that introduced the synthetic control estimator. My guest is Javier Gardeazabal, a professor at...

Welcome to this week’s episode of “The Mixtape with Scott”! My podcast tries to capture the personal stories of living economists and create an oral history of the profession from the narratives. And this week, I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. Avinash K. Dixit, a distinguished economist whose life’s work has influenced many fields within economics. But let me start by telling you a little about his background. Dr. Dixit is the John J. F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at...

Welcome to this week’s episode of "The Mixtape with Scott”! This podcast is dedicated to capturing the personal stories of living economists and creating an oral history of the profession through these narratives. This week, I’m excited to welcome David Autor, an esteemed labor economist from MIT, where he serves as the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor, as well as the Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He was also last year's VP of the AEA, is on the Foreign Affairs board of the US...

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Today, I get to have on the show someone who has become something of a friend the last few years, an expert in health economics and social policy, Adriana Lleras-Muney at UCLA, a Professor of Economics at UCLA. Dr. Lleras-Muney's journey in economics is super impressive and even involves traveling through all the alleyways of causal inference. After earning her Ph.D. from Columbia University where she wrote a job market paper on...

We have officially passed 100 episodes with today’s guest, and it’s wonderful to get to do it with my good friend, Manisha Shah. Manisha is the Chancelor’s Professor of Public Policy at University of California Berkeley. Manisha is an applied microeconomist who has historically specialized in topics related to health, education, gender and labor, with a particular focus on low and middle income countries. She has research appointments at NBER, BREAD, J-PAL, IZA and is also an editor at...

My producer is on vacation this week, and so I am unable to post my latest episode, so I thought I’d post an oldie but a goodie — my season 2 opening interview with Jeff Wooldridge, a much beloved econometrician and economist at Michigan State. So enjoy! Apologies and I’ll see you all next week with a new guest! Thanks again for all your support. Ciao! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid...

Greetings listeners! It is a pleasure to introduce this week’s guest on the podcast, Ashesh Rambachan, an assistant professor of economics at MIT. I wanted to talk to Ashesh for two main reasons. First, because I wanted to, and second, because I was aware of some of his recent work in econometrics. His recent article on evaluating the fragility of parallel trends in difference-in-differences just came out in the Review of Economic Studies. I’m also intrigued by his work with Sendhil...

This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is esteemed labor economist, Henry Farber, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Dr. Farber’s accolades are numerous: a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the Society of Labor Economists, and the Labor and Employment Relations Association, past President of the Society of Labor Economists, and recipient of the 2018 Jacob Mincer Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Labor Economics. You can find more...

This week's episode of "The Mixtape with Scott" features a conversation with Sarah Miller, a health economist at the University of Michigan. Sarah has made significant contributions to the field of economics, particularly in understanding gender dynamics and reproductive health. Her research has been influential in shaping public policy, and her groundbreaking study on the effect of Medicaid on mortality, conducted with Laura Wherry and Norman Johnson and published in the Quarterly Journal of...

This week's episode of "The Mixtape with Scott" features an insightful conversation with E. Glen Weyl, a distinguished economist whose career has spanned academia and industry. Glen earned his PhD from Princeton, spent three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and served as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he made significant contributions to micro theory applications to industrial organization. However, Glen’s journey took a transformative turn when he left...

This week on the podcast, Matthew Jackson from Stanford University is the guest and it was such a delight for me to talk to him and get to know his story a little better. I’d met him before, but only briefly, but I’d read a lot of his work because I once developed and taught a class on networks for our masters of economics students. His textbook on the economic and social networks is excellent but he also has a general interest book on networks if you’re wanting something more accessible....

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...