The Mixtape with Scott

In this episode, I introduce listeners to Michael Grossman, an early pioneer in the field of health economics. His dissertation work under at Columbia University on "health capital and demand" became a cornerstone of the modern field of health economics. We discuss his time growing up in New York, his time with Gary Becker at Columbia as his student, how he got into health in the first place, and much more. Mike is a much beloved economist and I hope you will enjoy this interview as much I did. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

In this week's episode of Mixtape the Podcast, I interview Mark Anderson, a health economist at Montana State University. We discuss his time growing up in Montana, his brief stint at Stanford playing football, how he got into economics, cannabis reform, public health at the turn of the 20th century, and the joys of hand collecting data. We also discuss a new course he is teaching for young faculty and students on doing applied research. Enjoy! Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

In this week's episode of the Mixtape podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Katy Graddy. Dr. Graddy is a professor of economics and dean of the international business school at Brandeis. She also did her PhD in economics at Princeton in the mid-1990s where as I see it design-based causal inference has its start and is gaining influence. We discussed the joys of collecting data and using it with economic theory to study markets. We discussed fish, art and bereavement, and some of the ways in which creativity manifests as an economist. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

In this week's episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, I have the pleasure of interviewing one of my truly favorite people I've met and learned from, Alvin Roth. Alvin Roth is the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and professor of economics at Stanford University. He is a widely regarded and extremely innovative game theorist who uses game theory not only to understand the world but to improve it. Those improvements broadly are grouped under a field we now call "market design", but it has included helping design kidney exchange policies that can help address kidney shortages, helping redesign the allocation of physicians to hospitals and residencies, and much more. A humble man who is as I say in the interview kinder than he is smart, which given he won the Nobel Prize says a lot about both. Always a joy to talk with this man. I hope you feel so too. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

In this interview, I had the opportunity to talk with a wonderful man, Alan Manning. Dr. Manning is a professor of economics at London School of Economics. He is a labor economist's labor economist. He has beat the steady drum of careful empirical work thinking hard about the welfare of workers and to evaluate the presence that market composition has on their overall well being. We discussed a new paper of his in the Journal of Human Resources trying to explain the source of a wage premium in Germany for workers in urban areas, and whether and to what degree that premium is due to local competition of firms. We talked about his whole career and I hope you enjoy it. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

In this interview, I talk with the esteemed economist, Susan Athey, a professor of economics at Stanford University and a recently elected President of the American Economics Association. She was one of a handful of micro theorist pioneers, like Hal Varian to Google and Preston McAfee to Yahoo, who in the early 2000s traveled from academia to work for large technology firms to work on market design elements, such as the design of auctions, that would enhance the productivity of the firms themselves. Dr. Athey did this first as a consultant at Microsoft, then as its first chief economist, then later on the board of more than a half dozen firms. She has since returned to her alma mater, Stanford University, where among her many activities she established a lab on social impact, and has written countless influential articles drawing on the strengths of machine learning methods and approaches at the service of causal inference. Just as Dixit predicted that she would win the John Bates Clark award, I’ll state the obvious that it will not be the last major Prize she wins. I hope you enjoy! Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

In this week’s podcast, I had a great time talking with Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, the Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and founder of several firms specializing in data analytics and education. As a scientist, he has made major contributions to the fields of statistics and political science, but more than that, he is also just one of the most creative, curious and passionate thinkers I’ve had the chance to meet. There is too much to summarize so let me just say I think, like I found him, you will likely be inspired as he shares his thoughts about science, the social order, inference and data. This is Mixtape: the Podcast and I am your host, Scott Cunningham! Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, I interviewed Petra Todd, professor of economics at University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Todd is a widely regarded and highly influential applied and theoretical econometrician who has written across many topics ranging from developing tests for evaluating racial discrimination in motor vehicle searches, to analysis of large conditional cash transfers (PROGRESA), to making seminal contributions to our understanding of program evaluation methodologies such as regression discontinuity design and matching. She is unique among many who write in the area of program evaluation for merging design based approaches to causal inference with approaches built on economic models, or "structural" methods. In this interview, we discussed her love of economics, her work with and mentorship from Jim Heckman, the early work she did studying the PROGRESA conditional cash transfer program and the value of structural econometrics more generally for applied researchers interested in causal inference and understanding programs. To learn more about the topics we discussed, see this new forthcoming article in the Journal of Economic Literature, coauthored with her former colleague Kenneth Wolpin, entitled “The Best of Both Worlds: Combining RCTs with Structural Modeling.” http://athena.sas.upenn.edu/petra/papers/surveywkenlatest.pdf Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Schwarz leads economics at Microsoft as Corporate Vice President and Chief Economist. A former professor at Harvard, Michael became an early pioneer in tech as part of a larger trend of top PhD economists moving into industry to work on a variety of real world topics related to market design and causal inference. In this interview, we discuss some of his ground breaking work in micro theory and application and the ongoing relevance and power of economic theory for understanding our social and corporate world. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Dr. Elizabeth Popp Berman, Associate Professor of Organizational Studies at University of Michigan, discusses her new book 'Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy' and the influence of economic reasoning in social policy. They explore the conflict within the Democratic party, the planning programming budgeting system (PPBS), conflicting views on universal health insurance, key actors and intellectual communities that shaped social policy, the influence of economic reasoning in crime policy, and the challenge of applying economic thinking in policy debates.