The Mixtape with Scott

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! We are getting closer to the hundredth episode! This is our 91st interview if I include Adam Smith (played by ChatGPT-4), which I absolutely will be counting. And the guest is someone I have admired for a long time — Martin Gaynor, or “Marty”. Marty is the J. Barone University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon both in the economics department and their policy school, Heinz College. But he is also special adviser to Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the federal Department of Justice, and it is not the first time that Marty has served in government as a public servant. He is also a former Director of the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. You can read some about his new position in the Department of Justice here. Marty works on the supply side of health, you might say, as opposed to the demand side. He studies markets and concentration, hospitals, firm competition, pricing — not just our health behaviors, but also the supply of healthcare through a mixture of market and non-market processes. If you go through his vita, you can see he’s racked up a lot of awards and publications over the years. There are many things you can say about Marty, and after this interview, two came to mind — resilient and kind. It was actually almost not the case that he would become as successful as an economist as he became, as he will share in this interview. He struggled initially to get a tenure track job, and even left academia briefly as a result. He is remarkably upbeat and realistic about the good fortune that he has had, though. And as you will see in this interview, it is very clear that he is a genuinely kind and warm hearted person.Marty also is a survivor in a more literal sense. He was nearly murdered in the antisemitic terrorist attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. That is his story to tell in this interview, not mine, but I will leave it at that. All of our stories matter. No matter who is listening or reading this, their personal story matters, and I hope that this interview is interesting and that you enjoy getting to know Marty a bit better. Thank you for all your support!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Economist Daniel Chen from Toulouse School of Economics discusses his journey from childhood to Harvard, exploring wide interests and curiosity in learning. He delves into governance, economic insights, law, economics, and social change, highlighting the intersection of economics and law. The podcast also covers historical data analysis, psychological aspects of projects, and the versatility of Otree data tool in research projects.

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! To set up this week’s guest, let me just share real quick a personal anecdote. When I graduated college, I got a job as a qualitative research analyst doing focus groups and in-depth interviews. I had majored in literature, so this was my first exposure to anything related to the social sciences. I loved the freedom the job gave me to collect my own data and develop my own theories about why people did the things they did. In the evenings I would read articles and books in sociology and anthropology as I felt more grounding in the social sciences could help me in doing a better job. One night I read Gary Becker’s Nobel Prize speech, “The Economic Way of Looking at Life”, at the University of Chicago’s John M. Olin working paper series. I was hooked. By the time I finished his speech, I knew I wanted to be an economist. But then I read other things too, like a quantitative paper by John Lott and David Mustard’s quantitative study on concealed carry laws and crime, and was equally mesmerized. And in that working paper series, I kept coming across references to someone named Ronald Coase and I then went elsewhere to learn about him and his prolific work. David Mustard was a Gary Becker student, and his paper on concealed carry had left an impression on me. He was an assistant professor at the University of Georgia so I applied there and one other school that used his county level crime data for studies on crime. I got into both and went with my ex-wife to visit the school and the faculty. In preparing for the trip, I read a paper by a professor at the University of Georgia named Peter Klein. The paper was entitled “New Institutional Economics” and it drew extensively on that Nobel Prize winning economist I had been learning about, Ronald Coase, another Nobel Laureate named Doug North at Washington University, and Oliver Williamson, a professor at Berkeley. The article was fascinating. It was about a field called “New Institutional Economics”, which I’d never heard of, and Klein explained it well. It was about the endogenous evolution of “institutions” to support and facilitate the organization of human interactions at a high level, most often to support commerce and trade though not just that. The ideas were deep and fascinating. I remember reading that article with a pen and highlighter, going over it and over it, hanging on every word. Not only was the topic fascinating, the author writing it was an excellent writer. There was not a wasted word in it. So when I met with the faculty, including Peter, I was sold on Georgia. But unfortunately, Peter was leaving Georgia for Mizzou and so I just barely missed being in the department with him. So that is a long winded bit of background into telling you that today’s guest is someone I’ve known now for over 20 years — Peter Klein, the W. W. Caruth Endowed Chair at Baylor University in the Entrepreneurship department. Peter is now a professor as well as the department chair at Baylor in our Entrepreneurship department. And so it is my pleasure to introduce you to him. Peter did a PhD at Berkeley and studied under Oliver Williamson, who I mentioned earlier. Williamson would go on to win the Nobel Prize for extending Coase’s theory of the firm and helping develop a more robust theory based on transaction cost economics. Peter’s work on the firm extends a lot of this work on transaction cost economics continues in that line focusing on the organization of the firm. He is the author of countless articles as well as a new book entitled Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company (with Nicolai Foss). It has been a real joy having him here since I missed him the first time around.As long time listeners know, though, I typically am doing a “mini-series” within the podcast, though, and Peter fits into one of those mini-series. Those mini-series are “the econometricians”, “causal inference and natural experiment methodology”, “Becker’s students”, “economists going to tech”, and then “public policy”. But another one I’m slowly picking at has to do with the wings of the profession that fall outside of the exclusively neoclassical tradition, one of which is Austrian economics. And Peter comes from that tradition, though he has mixed it with mainstream economics and made it into something of his own. So, with that being said, let me now turn you over to the podcast! Thanks again for tuning in!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is famed labor economist, Richard Blundell, the David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at the University of College at London. Dr. Blundell’s accolades are extensive: a Fellow of the Econometric Association, Fell of the American Academy of Arts and Science, former President of SOLE, of the Royal economic Society, recipient of the 2000 Frisch Prize, the 2020 Jacob Mincer Prize in Labor Economics, and on and on. You can find more information about his background here at this short biography. But ironically, it was for a different reason that I wanted to reach out to him. I was interested in reaching out to Dr. Blundell because of some research I had been doing on the history of difference-in-differences and throughout the 1990s, I kept coming back to him. He had several things he wrote in the 1990s that left me with the distinct impression that he was attempting to educate others about the bridging of causal inference and natural experiment methodologies, so I was just curious to learn more about him. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did! Thank you again for all your support! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! Due to a technical difficulty with my producer’s computer, this week’s interview was not ready in time. So we are going to do another repeat from season one. This is with Petra Todd, a labor economist, econometrician and author of a new book on causal inference entitled, Impact Evaluation in International Development with Paul Glewwe. She was also elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences last 2023. And she is Jim Heckman’s former student and coauthor, which fits with my slowly building deck of interviews on “Heckman’s students” (along with John Cawley and Chris Taber). But I also just loved this interview and so it’s also nice just to repost it. Plus, it’s probably nice I think to give people some breathing room given the pace at which these come out. Next week, though, I should be back on track with new episodes. Thanks again for tuning in!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

I’m still recovering from my travels over spring break, so I decided to repost an old interview I did in August 2022. This was my 27th podcast interview at the time and part of my “Economists in Tech” series, which has died down somewhat. The guest was Kyle Kretschman whose title at Spotify reads “Head of Economics”. This was a popular interview when it first came out, and I thought for newer listeners, they might like to listen to it again. Kyle came to Spotify after spending around 6-7 years at Amazon first. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a PhD in economics in 2011. PhD economists going into tech in the early teens was really just at the beginning — the flow and the stock was much smaller than it is now. So it was really interesting to listen to Kyle’s story about that move away from academia into tech when it was not quite as common a story as it is now. And I think the story really resonated with a lot of people, in general, when it first came out so I thought I’d share it again. Here’s a Q&A that UT Austin did with him in December 2022 if you want to read more of his story there too. Thanks again for tuning in!Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest on the Mixtape is Pierre Chiappori, a micro theorist at Columbia University. While Pierre is not technically a student of Gary Becker’s, there are many people who counted Becker as a colleague that probably at times did consider them also Becker’s student, and I suspect Pierre is one such person. I learned of Dr. Chiappori in graduate school while studying economics of the family. His collective models of the household always seemed a little bit outside of what I was studying, which was typically the Nash bargaining models of marriage, but I was also very interested too. It’s a run of papers he did in the 1990s, overlapping with when he was at Chicago with Becker, that sort of was the catalyst to ask him on the show. When I learned that he grew up in Monaco under the shadow of Princess Grace Kelly, and that he like me also loved Rear Window, I knew it was going to be an interesting talk. I hope you all enjoy it. Remember, the story of economics has been tributaries, many eddies, and listening all of them is in my opinion a way to show consideration to those people where consideration is nothing more than allowing their story to become real to us. I continue to believe that it is in the act of listening to stories that we are transformed and learn our own way. So I encourage you to listen closely to the story of Dr. Pierre Chiappori. Oh and this is our 87th interview. 13 more and we hit 100! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Explore the career journey of economist Marianne Bitler from MIT to academia, focusing on poverty programs and reproductive health. Reflect on challenges in grad school and the impact of mentors like Josh Angrist. Discover insights on public programs, social safety nets, and collaborations in research on welfare reforms and immigration.

Welcome to season three of the Mixtape with Scott — a podcast devoted to listening to the stories of living economists and creating an oral history of the last 50 years of the profession. This week’s interview is with Wilbert van der Klaauw, economic research advisor in the Household and Public Policy Research Division and the director of the Center for Microeconomic Data with the New York Fed. Wilbert has an interesting story for many reasons. He fits with my longstanding interest in causal inference for his early work on regression discontinuity design, both alone and with Hahn and Todd in their 2001 Econometrica. But I also wanted to hear his story because of his decision to leave academia as a full professor at UNC Chapel Hill to work at the Federal Reserve. (Which again brings to mind that part of the story of the profession is the Federal Reserve itself but that’s for another day). So it was a real interesting experience to get to talk with Wilbert and hear more about his life coming from the Netherlands to study at Erasmus, where he met a young Guido Imbens — a detail I didn’t know about either — and studied econometrics as his undergraduate major (a major I also didn’t know existed apart from economics). So I hope you enjoy this interview! Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

Bruce Hansen, an econometrician from the University of Wisconsin, shares insights into his career and influences, from free textbooks to his upbringing in Southern California. The podcast covers his transition from music to social science and his journey to becoming a leading figure in econometrics, highlighting the evolution of the field and the impact of his collaborative research.