If you are married, you are statistically much more likely to report being happy than if you’re unmarried. In fact, Chicago Booth’s Sam Peltzman notes that the difference in terms of happiness is the same as either being in the top 10 percent of earners, or the bottom 10 percent. Having said that, his research also shows that the richer you are, the happier you are. In this episode, we talk with him about his research.

Companies in the US have faced a new kind of pressure in recent years from ‘stakeholder capitalism’ or ‘woke capitalism.’ How should corporations respond? In this episode, we bring you a conversation between Alison Taylor, a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the author of the author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, and Chicago Booth’s John Paul Rollert. The conversation was recorded at an event co-sponsored by Chicago Booth Review, Booth’s Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation, and the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.

Chad Syverson discusses the importance of management for productivity, even with AI. Topics include the impact of managers on retail sales, the role of management in AI implementation, and the challenges of hybrid work setups on productivity.

The market for services is global, and many of us are used to having our issues fielded by someone in India. For decades, big companies in the US and Europe have set up global capability centers in India to handle back-office operations. In this episode, we hear from Chicago Booth’s Raghuram Rajan, who sees the future of India’s economy as moving from the back office to the front-of-house. This is the second of our two conversations with Rajan about his new book, Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity.

David Brooks, New York Times columnist and author of 'How to Know a Person', discusses the importance of small interactions in making others feel valued. He explores human behavior, connection, effective communication across differences, and the transformative power of truly understanding and appreciating others.

Most US companies have a toxic culture, according to Lucia Annunzio, Adjunct Associate Professor of Executive Education at Chicago Booth. The hallmarks are a lack of transparency, short-termism, and top-down leadership. As a result, employees feel micromanaged, stressed, and disengaged. So what can managers do to stop the toxicity and create a healthy work culture?

With a population of 1.4 billion, India is the world’s biggest democracy and already one of the world’s leading economies, but it still has huge potential to grow its economy. So how should India grow? And what does the country need to realize the potential of its human capital? In this episode, we speak to Chicago Booth’s Raghuram Rajan, who served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, about his new book, Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity. This is the first of two podcasts with Rajan about the book. 

Political folk wisdom tells us that people become more conservative as they get older. But does the evidence back that up? And is the political divide between older and younger voters getting bigger? In this episode, we speak with Chicago Booth’s Sam Peltzman about his research on political ideology.

For the past 20 years, the growth in US productivity has been sluggish at about 1.2%, compared to the 3% pace at which it grew from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Chicago Booth’s Chad Syverson says that if US productivity hadn’t slowed, the US economy would be bigger to the tune of $25,000 per person. So what’s happening to productivity, and is it finally about to turn the corner?

Climate change is a global problem, so it can’t be solved by a limited number of countries acting alone. But can we develop and enforce global rules? In this episode, we hear from Chicago Booth’s Christian Leuz, an accounting professor who advocates for companies to report their carbon emissions. This is our second podcast with Leuz about emissions reporting and climate change. We released the first in March under the title, “Could reporting carbon emissions help cut them?”