S2E9: Interview with Joseph Doyle, Economist, MIT Professor

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 high school completion and adult incarceration, and more. The welfare of children, as it turns out, has been a longstanding research focus of Dr. Doyle’s, and because I’ve written on foster care myself, and because his paper with Anna Aizer study the causal effect that juvenile incarceration has on high school completion and adult incarceration is one of my favorite applied papers ever written by economists, I have constantly gravitated back to him and his work.

Dr. Doyle someone I’ve always looked up to for a variety of reasons, not just topics, but also his ingenious approaches to identification of causal effects outside the purely randomized controlled trial. After all, no one would ever entertain the possibility of randomly assigning children to incarceration even if the question of what effect it has on life outcomes is of supreme importance. And so we are dependent on the work of people like Dr. Doyle who care about the topic too, but also have the skill and seriousness of mind and heart to develop plausible strategies to answer the question — not because the methods are cute, but because the question is so vital and important that it begs to be answered. I enjoyed this hour with Dr. Doyle, and hope you do too. Please remember to share, subscribe and like the episode!

And apologies the video below is messed up; I got a new computer and the Zoom wasn’t working right. So unlike usually seeing us side by side, it’s one person at a time. And I am off on naming the order of episodes — this is episode 8, not 10.

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