The Mixtape with Scott

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.

In this week’s episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing longterm editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Larry Katz. Dr. Katz is a distinguished labor economist and a pillar in the profession as editor of the more impactful and influential journal in our science. He has written a number of classic studies in labor economics ranging from topics like skill based changes in relative wages with Kevin Murphy to the importance of neighborhoods on life outcomes based on the Moving to Opportunity experiment. As with many of the people I have the chance to interview, Dr. Katz has forgotten more economics than I will ever know. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Peter Hull is young econometrician at Brown University who writes about a variety of applied topics such as education, labor and criminal justice. Most of his work manages to simultaneously reveal something new about a phenomena while also extending our methodological understanding of causal inference. In this episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, Peter and I talk about growing up in Maine as a child spending time near the water and outdoors as well as in mathematics. We talk about the unexpected journey he made into economics as a college student when he saw its potential to meaningfully inform public policy, as well as econometrics' ability to answer causal questions. We talk about his love of instrumental variables in particular, the potential outcomes model, causal inference and a new paper of his with Michal Kolesar and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham on interpreting regressions with multiple treatment variables. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Guido Imbens is the Applied Econometrics Professor at Stanford University's economics department and business school, as well as a co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the local average treatment effect and instrumental variables in his 1990s era work with Josh Angrist. In this interview we discuss that time in his life, his influences, his career and collaborations over the last several decades. Dr. Imbens is one of the more enjoyable people I've had the pleasure of meeting in all of economics. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

In this 8th episode of Mixtape: the Podcast, I interviewed Sandy Darity, the Samuel DuBois Professor of Public Policy at Duke’s Sanford School and pioneer in a framework within economics called "stratification economics". Stratification economics focuses on the determinants of group-level inequality rooted in group identity, relative position within society, and historic inequalities that compound over time. But we also discuss his love Tarheels basketball, growing up in the Middle East and the degree to which scarcity should be the foundation of economics or not. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 7 of Mixtape: the Podcast. I interview Josh Angrist, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics, Ford professor of economics at MIT, and director of the MIT Blueprint Labs. In this interview, we discuss a range of topics such as being bored and aimless as a young man, his time in the Israeli army as a paratrooper, his time at the 1980s Princeton Industrial Labor Relations group, his collaborations with fellow Nobel laureate Guido Imbens and the late Alan Krueger, as well as the econometric contributions he made to our understanding of causal inference and instrumental variables for which the Nobel Committee awarded him the prize. A pioneer in many ways who through his scholarship, mentoring, and proselytizing of causal inference and applied methodology, Josh Angrist is arguably one of the most important figures in empirical microeconomics of the last 50 years and a delightful person to interview. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Orley Ashenfelter is arguably the founding father of one of the most influential empirical movements in the modern era -- the so-called credibility revolution. He was the adviser to two Nobel laureates (Josh Angrist and David Card), and guided the Princeton Industrial Relations group for years. Arguably if not one of the most important labor economists of his generation, then at least one of the sharpest. In this interview we talk about his influences, his discovery of the famed Ashenfelter Dip, the popular research design difference-in-differences and more. Check it out! Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

When I think of the economics of the minimum wage, I think of Ted Lasso season 2 when we learn of a pretend new book by Brené Brown, "Enter the Arena, But Bring a Knife". The economics of minimum wage is not for the faint of heart as the question of its effect, both in theory and in reality, has been debated fiercely by extraordinarily competent labor economists for decades, and I don't see it ending any time soon. In this interview, I talk with two economists linked to Texas A&M's economics department -- Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West -- an important paper in the minimum wage literature published in a 2016 issue one of the top labor economics journal, the Journal of Human Resources, about their work on the minimum wage. Check it out and prepared to have your priors confirmed and/or challenged about this important program! Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe