Policy@McCombs

Michael Munger joins us this episode to discuss whether or not capitalism is sustainable. Professor Munger received his Ph.D. in Economics at Washington University in St. Louis in 1984. Following his graduate training, he worked as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission. His first teaching job was in the Economics Department at Dartmouth […]

Peter Arcidiacono joins us to talk about his work in identifying bias and discrimination in the Harvard admissions process.

Professor Arcidiacono specializes in research involving applied microeconomics, applied economics, and labor economics. His research primarily focuses on education and discrimination. His work focuses specifically on the exploration of a variety of subjects, such as structural estimation, affirmative action, minimum wages, teen sex, discrimination, higher education, and dynamic discrete choice models, among others. He recently received funding from a National Science Foundation Grant for his project, “CCP Estimation of Dynamic Discrete Choice Models with Unobserved Heterogeneity.” He has also been awarded grants from NICHD for his work entitled, “A Dynamic Model of Teen Sex, Abortion, and Childbearing;” and from the Smith Richardson Foundation for his study, “Does the River Spill Over? Race and Peer Effects in the College & Beyond” with Jacob Vigdor. Other recent studies of his include, “The Distributional Effects of Minimum Wage Increases when Both Labor Supply and Labor Demand are Endogenous” with Tom Ahm and Walter Wessles; “Explaining Cross-racial Differences in Teenage Labor Force Participation: Results from a General Equilibrium Search Model” with Alvin Murphy and Omari Swinton; and “The Effects of Gender Interactions in the Lab and in the Field” in collaboration with Kate Antonovics and Randy Walsh.

Enrico Moretti joins us to talk about America’s most dynamic labor markets, the “brain hubs”  and their impact in the U.S economy and society.

Enrico Moretti is the Michael Peevey and Donald Vial Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He serves as the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Economic Perspectives and is a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He is also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge), Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn).

David Schmidtz is Kendrick Professor of Philosophy in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic in the Eller College of Management. He is editor-in-chief of Social Philosophy and Policy. He was founding Head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.

If real capitalism exists, is it sustainable? Or does capitalism in a democracy always devolve into corporatist cronyism? In this talk, Mario Villarreal-Diaz discusses how free markets may have a tendency towards cronyism, how the democratic political process makes this trend worse, and what can be done to mitigate emerging related problems.

Avik Roy is the co-founder and president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREEOP). Avik joins Policy@McCombs to make the conservative case for universal health insurance.

Bryan Caplan is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. Bryan joins Policy@McCombs to discuss his recent book, The Case Against Education.

Ryan Streeter, Director of Domestic Policy for the American Enterprise Institute, joins us in studio to discuss localism.

Professor Larry Ball (Johns Hopkins) joins us in the studio to discuss his recent book, The Fed and Lehman Brothers.