The Mixtape with Scott

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.

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