S3E4: Andrew Baker, Professor, UC Berkeley Law

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 Financial Economics, was the winner of the Jensen Prize for the best paper published in Corporate Finance. He is for many people permanently part of the last five year’s or so “credibility crisis in difference-in-differences” for both this paper, as well as other things he’s written and done. So I thought it would be great to have him on the show as part of the larger material on causal inference in economics.

But Andrew is not an economist. He has a joint JD/PHD from Stanford, but the PhD is in Business Administration with a special focus on accounting. I nonetheless included him in this series as part of the “story of economics” because like Carlos Celinni last week’s guest, Andrew started out in economics as an undergraduate at Georgetown, then went to work for an economic consulting firm, then did a predoc with John Donohue III, professor of law at Stanford and PhD economist from Yale. But then he instead went into Stanford’s law school before migrating into their doctoral program in business administration. And I thought this kind of story — the story of people staying in, but also of people exiting — is really a part of the larger economics story too. It’s still somewhat challenging to find these stories, so I’m going to keep trying, but I wanted to if I could by circling people who I knew it applied to.

But, as with others, the point of Andrew being a guest on the show is simply because I think he does have an interesting story, and I wanted to hear it. I hope others of you hear it too. Thanks again for tuning into the podcast. Please like share etc!

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