The Mixtape with Scott

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Recently, the University of Chicago Press published a book entitled The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker. It was written obviously by Gary Becker who died almost 10 years ago at the age of 83 after an extremely long and fruitful career as an economist. Dr. Becker had many students — some like me were students from afar, but some, like our guest today, were his actual students. And today’s guest is Casey Mulligan, one of the editors of that aforementioned book, and a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. This was a fun interview to do. Casey walked us through his time at Harvard as an undergrad to his unusually rapid progression through Chicago’s economics PhD program where he stayed on and is now a professor. We discussed his own career but we also spent just a lot of time discussing what it was like with Becker, as well as his own later time at the Council of Economic Advisers. I hope you enjoy it!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

Sascha Becker, an economist and historian at Monash University, discusses his research on religion's impact on literacy and human capital, as well as his work on the spread of causal inference in economics. Topics covered include the Protestant work ethic, the relationship between the church and national socialism, and how Luther's influence spread geographically during the Reformation. Sascha also reflects on his career, including his regrets and the importance of collaboration.

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! This week's episode has a guest that some of you have come to know and appreciate, and some of you hopefully will after this episode — Andrew Goodman-Bacon (“Bacon”). In addition to having a great nickname, he also has a great job, a great personality and several great papers, one of which after only two years since publication has won an award at the Journal of Econometrics, and already has over 4,000 cites. I really wish I knew how to pull things from google scholar and I could see what other papers in the history of econometrics have had such a meteoric rise in terms of impact and influence. It’s been unusually impactful, though, let’s just say. I have a hunch Bacon wasn’t given the “Most Likely to Actually Use Math After High School” award in high school. But as it turns out, he has, and has become a really great applied economist who works on topics both in econometrics, but also public policy and economic history. The trifecta. But a few years ago, he left academia to go work for the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis at the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute. This interview was a real delight; it even involves Dungeons & Dragons and throwing knives. Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Bacon has done a lot for helping a lot of us better understand difference-in-differences — a technique that many of us thought (much to our chagrin) we probably understood better than we did (I know I didn’t). But now some of us better understand it and while Bacon isn’t the only one who helped advance that knowledge, he was one of them. So I hope you enjoy this interview, and if you’re interested in learning more about difference-in-differences, don’t forget to check out Brant Callaway’s workshop on Mixtape Sessions tonight! You can sign up here! Don’t forget also to share the workshop to everybody you’ve ever met in your entire life, as well as post to your online dating profile!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 another episode of the Mixtape with Scott podcast! This week is a special one for the economics community as we celebrate Claudia Goldin's well-deserved Nobel Prize win for her pioneering work on women in the labor market. It's serendipitous, then, that today's guest is Melanie Guldi, associate professor of economics at University of Central Florida, who has spent over 15 years since graduating in 2006 from the University of California — Davis doctoral program in economics carving out a unique path in related terrain focused on the economics of fertility. Melanie’s 2008 job market paper and subsequent publication in Demography examined in greater detail a question that Goldin had earlier suggested — did early access to oral contraception and abortion cause birth rates to decline? Melanie found some evidence it did, at least for some groups. But, while Melanie's work has some thematic intersections with that of Dr. Goldin, Melanie has become an authority in her own right on the complex landscape of health economics and demography. Her expertise touches on a wide range of critical issues, from maternal labor supply to the impact of intensive care on infant survival, and she has developed novel hypotheses that have further enriched our understanding of these topics. So, without further ado, let's dive into this rich tapestry of research and insights with someone who has dedicated a decade and a half to becoming an expert in the field. Melanie, welcome to the show.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 this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott. I guess I could say “And I am your host Scott Cunningham” but after over 50 of these, I guess you already know I’m the host. When I first became interested in economics, it was through an old working paper series called the John M. Olin working paper series, which was then affiliated with the University of Chicago’s law school. That was where I found Becker’s Nobel Prize speech which caused an immediate 180 on my career and led me into economics myself. But the thing that really stood out to me was that economics was about more than just banking and money; apparently it was also connected to law, and more specifically, there was a field called “law and economics” even. As I read more of the working papers at the working paper series, I became more and more interested with everything there, including law and economics. Which my way of creating a segue into this week’s guest.I first met Jonah Gelbach, the Herman Selvin professor of law at UC Berkeley, at a conference in Paris on crime. He probably doesn’t even remember it. All I really remember of Jonah in that conference was two things. First, he pulled me aside and said a lot of nice things about my paper and told me thought it would publish really well. So that was encouraging and I made a note to myself, “Note to self, this guy said it would publish well. Hold him to it.” Second, I remember him passionately responding to his discussant that the paper he’d written had something called “a surface”. And I made a second note to myself, “Note to self, learn what a surface is.” It was something very clearly related to original, very technical, econometrics, and I made a third note to myself after that. “Note to self, this this guy’s name is Jonah Gelbach, and he apparently is a very good econometrician who also works on applied matters.”Jonah’s an economist and a lawyer. He’s written several very influential articles in both econometrics but also applied economics. He did a PhD at MIT under Josh Angrist, if I remember correctly, during that heady time when causal inference was blossoming in Cambridge in the 1990s (he graduated in 1998). He then took a job at Maryland where he was eventually tenured, then to Arizona where he stayed until 2010. He then took the road less traveled: he quit a tenured job as an economics professor, went to Yale and got a JD in 2013, then went to Penn and is now at Berkeley where he writes in all the areas that he apparently loves — law, economics and econometrics. I asked Jonah to be on the show for a few reasons. First, I made a note to myself to remember this guy for a reason. He’s very talented and very approachable, kind and thoughtful and funny. But two, as I said, he took the road less traveled. Quitting a tenured job in academia, giving up the golden handcuffs as they say, to go to law school to start over — it’s not the most common way to get a JD, arguably. And I guess I just wanted to learn that story a little better as I didn’t know it. But third, law and economics — now circling back where I started — is part of the story of economics of the last 50 years, and the podcast is ultimately about two things: the personal stories of economists building out the collective story of economics. We are a diverse tribe. Law and economics is part of that tribe’s story. And economists sitting inside law schools has also become part of that tribe’s story. And so I asked Jonah, and he graciously accepted, to be on the podcast so here he is! 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

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! I’m your host - Scott Cunningham, a professor at Baylor in their economics department. This week's guest is with none other than Amy Finkelstein, the John Bates Clark award and MacArthur Genius grant winner, and professor of economics at MIT. This was a fun interview — super generous, giving guest who shared a lot of her life, how she grew up in New York and then through her own windy road found her way to economics. She has a new book out “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care” (with Liran Einav).I loved this interview. We talked about the Oregon Medicaid Experiment, which I talk about in my book in the instrumental variables chapter when discussing lotteries. She shares where that idea came from, and it was super exciting to hear about that. I hope you like the interview as much as me.Remember if you like the interview, consider supporting it by subscribing, liking, sharing or even becoming a paying subscriber. Enjoy!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 podcast! That feels strange typing since by now, I shouldn’t have to write it that way, but you never know — maybe someone is coming today for the first time and will be coming upon the second part of a two part interview with Nick Cox, a geographer at Durham in the UK, and longtime contributor to public and club goods around Stata, the software used by many economists at least. This is as I said Part 2 in a two part interview. The point of interviewing Nick as I said last time is that this podcast is an oral history of the economics profession of the last 50 years told through the personal stories of economists, and others that I think otherwise fit into that story. And the software we use to do our work, particularly when it allowed many of us to do empirical work for most of our careers, is a big part of that story. And Stata is a big part of that story, and Nick is a big part of Stata’s story, so I did a two part interview with him. Apologies that I have been slow updating the substack. I’ve had what feels like a lot more grading and administrative work than usual. I’ve also got a tad bit of some personal things coming to a head right now, and I’m hoping that will end soon. Tomorrow I will post some information about a few upcoming workshops at Mixtape Sessions, but while I have your attention, one of them is on shift-share IV with Peter Hull which starts next week September 25 and 27 in the evening from 6-9PM. Details here at this link. Should be great. You’ll learn be essentially brought to the frontier of this material and there’s going to be a lot of coding so that should be fun. So check it out! In the meantime, thanks for supporting the podcast, which as you’ve probably figured out by now is my labor of love, my passion project. I have found that personal grief in my own life has been made more meaningful for some reason through this style of documentary biography of others in our profession. I hope you find it useful and interesting too. If you like this podcast, please consider supporting it. But share it with someone who you think will find it useful too. As I tell myself and others — all of us belong. All of our stories matter. Yours and mine too, as well as the people I talk to. So have a great day.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

Apologies I double posted a podcast this morning. I will finish the Nick Cox interview next week. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott — where we listen to the personal stories of economists and hope that what bubbles up in the long run is a curated collective story of the economics profession of the last 50 years. This week’s interview guest is part of my “Becker’s Students” series which highlights the students of the late economist, Gary Becker, a legendary giant of microeconomics from both Columbia University as well as the University of Chicago, and who I also personally have admired so much that when I first read his Nobel Prize, I decided I also wanted to be an economist. This week’s interview is with someone I’ve come to count as a friend as well as being a long-time admirer — John Cawley, professor of economics at Cornell University. John has been a force of nature within health economics for several generations contribution to major topics in health like obesity and risky behaviors, as well as labor economics. Friendly and supportive to everyone, to a fault even, it was such a nice opportunity to get to talk to him in this interview. We discussed many things in this interview that I think it is probably just better left for John to share. But I am excited to get to share it with you now. Thank you again for supporting the podcast. I hope if you like it you will share it with others and enjoy the rest of your week too!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 episode of the Mixtape with Scott is with a professor at Durham in England in the geography department, Dr. Nick Cox. Many economists will only know of Nick because of his presence on the Stata listserv where he was one of its most prolific contributors and moderators. As economics as a field gradually shifted from theory to empirical work, at least as a share of the total papers written and total people employed, people like Nick and others became more relevant people in our lives as empiricists. We would go to the Stata listserv with questions, and more times than not, it would be Nick answering them. I wanted to interview Nick because as I told him, the purpose of the podcast is to tell the story of the last 50 years of the economics profession by listening to the personal stories of real people. Mostly, that has been economists, but sometimes not. And Nick is one of those sometimes not. He’s a geographer at Durham who, like Bill Greene the econometrician I interviewed a week ago, first began to see his love and aptitude for statistics mature along with a desire to help his colleagues with their own programming problems. That particular kind of worker for whom the latent understanding of statistics and econometrics also selects on skills with computing has and will likely remain a powerful complement, and for Nick it was indeed. We go through his early life, growing up in England, and moving into geography and statistics in college, as well as over two separate interviews travel into his early time finding and becoming more a part of the Stata community. I tell Nick that I saw in him things I wanted for myself — someone who in his own way was part of community development within academia in the odd spaces of work, and had hoped we could talk to discuss more of what that journey was for him. And he graciously agreed. Apologies that my opener is longer than normal; I didn’t have a script so rambled (always a mistake). Thanks again for tuning in; like, share, follow, and consider maybe even becoming a subscriber!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

Good morning! Welcome to another episode of the Mixtape with Scott! This week is a lot of fun. I got to interview none other than William Greene, Professor Emeritus at NYU and author of 8 editions of a great textbook on Econometrics, as well as a software developer from an econometrics software called LimDep. What a fun trip through the past — through growing up in Long Island, his family moving to Ohio when a recession cost his dad his job, and moving into grad school where Bill began to realize his skills in computing and econometrics were complements. It was a fascinating story about early computing and applied econometrics software, and his career as an econometrician. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Please share! Like! Put it on your phone! Give it to your kids for Christmas!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