The Mixtape with Scott

Welcome back to The Mixtape with Scott, the podcast where we explore the personal stories behind the professional lives of economists. I’m your host, Scott Cunningham, coming to you from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Each week, we dive into the journeys, insights, and lives of economists whose work shapes how we understand the world.

This week’s guest is Elizabeth Cascio. Elizabeth studies education, public policy, and the well-being of children. Her research often looks at big policy changes in 20th-century America, like the spread of publicly funded early education and major civil rights, education, and immigration laws. Recently, she’s focused on childcare and early education, trying to understand how policy design, economic conditions, and political voice shape educational attainment and economic mobility.

Elizabeth’s work has been published in leading economics journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and The Journal of Public Economics. She’s also written policy pieces for The Hamilton Project. She’s a professor at Dartmouth College and holds research affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor. She’s served on editorial boards and is currently an editor at The Journal of Labor Economics.

This episode is also part of a series I’ve been doing called “The Students of…,” where I talk to students of economists in areas I’m particularly interested in. One of those areas is “The Students of David Card.” Elizabeth earned her Ph.D. at Berkeley, where David Card and Ken Chay—both key figures in the development of causal inference within labor economics—were significant influences on her work. Once you hear about her research, their impact becomes clear.

Elizabeth’s work touches on economic history, but she’s primarily a labor economist and public policy researcher. She uses history as a tool to understand policy and its impacts on children and families. Her work connects the past to the present in ways that make big questions about education and mobility clearer.

So, let’s jump in. Please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Cascio to The Mixtape with Scott. Elizabeth, thanks for being here.

Welcome to the latest episode of the Mixtape with Scott. This week my guest is Tim Bartik from the Upjohn Institute. Let me briefly share some things about Tim. Many of you may know Tim from the shift-share instrument which oftentimes is referred to as Bartik instruments. That’s what I refer to it in a section of my book, for instance. It has been more carefully studied by econometricians over the last few years, such as Borusyak, Hull and Jaravel who have studied it from the shock side, and Goldsmith-Pinkham, Sorkin and Swift from the share side.

Tim has spent a career studying public policy as a a labor economist who focuses a lot on economic development and regional labor markets. This interview was a candid one where Tim generously shared many aspects of his professional journey, as well as his personal philosophical perspectives on work and public policy. I think many of you will find it interesting and even inspiring, particularly those of you whose first love is policy and labor. Thank you again for your support! I hope you find this an interesting and inspiring interview with a great economist.

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Greetings everyone! The leaves on the tree are turning orange as we inch our way towards Halloween and some of us in some unbearably hot portions of the world get to finally see how the good half live and have a whisper of pleasant weather even if it will only be here for a second or two.

This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is Miikka Rokkanen. Miikka is in Consumer Behavior Analytics at Amazon and is part of two of my larger series. First, he is part of my stories about the PhD economists who have gone into the tech industry. But Miikka also fits in another long running story about the “children and grandchildren of the credibility revolution”. That is, Miikka went to MIT for his PhD and was one of Joshua Angrist’s advisees. Miikka can share his full story but he is an economist who started out in academia (Columbia University) and then early on moved into industry at Amazon and having lived both lives can share what that has been like for him. It was great getting to know him better and hearing what his life journey has been like and I hope you enjoy this interview.

For those new to the podcast, though, this is not really a podcast about economics but rather is a podcast about economists. It’s a podcast devoted to sharing economists’ stories about how they got from the point of being a little kid, going through grade school, high school, college and their PhDs into the careers they’re in now. And in learning and hearing these stories and sharing them, it’s hoped that over time it can form a bit of an oral history of the profession. I select people based on larger series I’m interested in — like “Economics who go into tech” or “the students of …” — so it is not exhaustive, and won’t be, but I hope nonetheless that these stories can help, encourage and expand your imagination. Thank you again for all your support.

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott! It’s a pleasure to introduce this week’s guest from Stanford University, Maya Rossin-Slater. Maya is a health economist who specializes in areas related to families in particular. Early work of hers focused on public policies aimed at labor markets as an avenue for helping families, notably paid leave. Her work has been unique for focusing on all parts of the family — mothers, fathers, as well as children. Her more recent work has moved into distressful events that affect all people in the family, and which most recently has moved into focusing on school shootings’ effects on the survivors. When you list all of Maya’s work, you can see patterns — spillovers within and across families, within schools, distressful events impact on the family, assistance in the labor market and its effect on families, and various topics in health. It’s a robust research agenda that seems to have over time shown real patterns of interest spanning all topics relevant to our understanding of the family as an important part of society, and policies that can help, including policies that encourage work.

But it is also fun to have Maya on the show because as longtime listeners know, I have an abiding interest in the “children and grandchildren of the revolution” — meaning those economists who can trace their lineage back to the Princeton Industrial Relations Section. And Maya is also a grandchild of the revolution. Her advisor was Janet Currie whose advisors were Orley Ashenfelter and David Card. So it is interesting to see the propagation of that department moving through the profession. May is only a few links removed from it, but you can see all the finger prints of the Section on her work — meticulous, observant, seeking credible answers to important policy questions regarding workers and their families using credible sources of variation that resemble an experimental design framework.

So thank you for all tuning in! And thank you for all your wonderful support.

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! Sometimes the shortest distance between point A and point B is a straight line, but other times the shortest distance is a winding path. This week’s guest, Mohammad Akbarpour from Stanford University, is perhaps an example of the latter. Mohammad is a micro theorist at Stanford who specializes in networks, mechanism and design and two sided matching. Mohammad is an emerging young theorist at Stanford, student of such luminaries as Matt Jackson and Al Roth, whose background in engineering, mathematics and computer science has given him a fresh approach to topics that I associate with Stanford’s theory people as a whole — policy oriented, applied work, mechanism design, networks and matching. He got into economics “the long way” — growing up in Iran, majoring in engineering, and then moving into Stanford’s operations research PhD program. In this interview, he generously shares a snippet of the arc of his life, and it’s a remarkable story, and one I really enjoyed hearing. I think you will too.

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Greetings! Today’s guest on the Mixtape needs no introduction, but I guess I will anyway. N. Greg Mankiw is a household name to many of us in economics. Either you are a macroeconomist, and his work in new Keynesian economics was something that you had come to know extremely well, or you are literally every other economist, and his principles of economics textbooks you know backwards and forwards because it was either the book you studied as a sophomore in college, or probably even more common, it was the book you used to learn how to teach economics. This interview was a lot of fun, and it kind of fits in a way with something that I keep gravitating towards which is to talk to people in economics who have written textbooks — people like Bill Greene, Mas Col-ell, Jeff Wooldridge, Angrist and Pischke. Thanks again for tuning in.

And I know I said I was going to move to doing these every other week, but man does it seem like it’s been a long time since I’ve done one, so I’m not sure but I will have to decide if I can handle doing them only every other week. We’ll see.

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome the Mixtape with Scott! This is a podcast with a simple objective: listen to the personal stories of living economists who are the primary guests I have on the show. The secondary goal is to follow a thread of people around topics I care about and allow a patchwork story of the profession to form based on, from and through those personal narratives. This is the 105th episode of the podcast, and the first episode of season four. Wow! Time flies.

Today’s guest is name known to most — Dr. Janet Currie. Dr Currie attended Princeton for her PhD, graduating in 1988, spent a large chunk of her career at UCLA, before coming back to Princeton where she is now the Henry Putnam Professor in both the economics dept and the policy school. She’s had an illustrious and impactful career, which is still going, managing a deep portfolio of scientific contributions that I struggle to synthesize it easily. But broadly speaking, her work has focused a lot children, health, mental health, substance abuse and public policy. The work has so many connections over time but also across studies that it was surprising to be honest as we spoke how so much of her work went together, even when it seemed like it wasn’t obvious that it would — even her early work on collective bargaining and teachers unions leads to children, both through schools but also the household bargaining models of the early 80s. Her work on the mental health of children leads naturally into her later work on opiates when you consider the links connect through supply side treatment of attention deficit disorder and supply side prescriptions of opiates. All I could see as we spoke was this giant knowledge graph, like a spider web, connecting papers and topics to one another even when the topics themselves would shift. It was a real joy to have a chance to hear this career in her own words.

One of the themes of the podcast has been the credibility revolution, which is a paradigm regarding empirical work that emerged in the 1970s at Princeton University. It is largely associated with the Industrial Relations Section, Orley Ashenfelter, and his many students and the students of his students. And Janet was an Orley student, as well as the student of one of Orley’s students, the 2021 Nobel Laureate David Card. Having her on here, and the openness with which she shared her story with me, allowed me to learn more about the program at the time she was there, for which I am grateful on top of being grateful for hearing her story.

Thank you for your support and I hope this interview is one you enjoy. It’s 90 minutes but it’s a high mean low variance 90 minutes in my opinion!

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott, a podcast devoted to listening to the personal stories of living economists and creating an oral history of the profession. This episode is partly inspired by my visit to San Sebastián, Spain, with my daughter right now and partly inspired by a 2003 article co-authored with Alberto Abadie studying the effect of terrorism on economic growth that introduced the synthetic control estimator. My guest is Javier Gardeazabal, a professor at the University of the Basque Country.

Javier Gardeazabal is a professor at the University of the Basque Country whose body of work has covered topics in macroeconomics, time series econometrics, labor economics, cultural economics, and political economy. He did his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in May 1991, an experience that he will share about in the interview. He is from the Basque Country and returned to the Basque Country after graduation where he has been ever since. It is therefore inspiring to me that his home became the topic of a paper that he is perhaps most widely known for — a seminal contribution to both causal inference and measuring the economic costs of terrorism, coauthored with Alberto Abadie, in the 2003 American Economic Review paper, “The Economic Cost of Conflict: A Case Study of the Basque Country.” This groundbreaking study made a major contribution to causal inference by introducing the synthetic control estimator, but also assessing the economic impact of terrorism on economic growth in the Basque Country. It was a major contribution to the field possessing all the elements of great articles in economics — an important question answered extraordinarily well with clarity and rigor.

This influential paper not only cast a massive shadow over the evolution of causal inference and econometrics; it also accelerated Javier’s own research to include not only macroeconomics, but also the economics of terrorism and conflict. His career is evidence of an economist who followed his curiosity and intellectual interests to include understanding the economic costs of terrorism, introducing methods for measuring the aggregate cost of conflict, and the impact of political violence on economic well-being, but also exchange rate dynamics, time series econometrics, cultural policies, optimal test scoring methods, gender wage discrimination and more. Javier’s versatility is evident in his ability to adapt to and excel in a variety of economic topics and methodologies, continually evolving to address new and relevant economic issues.

Thank you again everyone for supporting the podcast and the substack. I hope that this interview speaks to you wherever you are, whenever you are.

Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to this week’s episode of “The Mixtape with Scott”! My podcast tries to capture the personal stories of living economists and create an oral history of the profession from the narratives. And this week, I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. Avinash K. Dixit, a distinguished economist whose life’s work has influenced many fields within economics. But let me start by telling you a little about his background.

Dr. Dixit is the John J. F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University. He also serves as a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and is a Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. For his many contributions to science, he has been awarded numerous accolades, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He was also honored with India’s Padma Vibhushan in 2016, recognizing his outstanding contributions to literature and education.

As he will share, he was born in Mumbai, India and attended St. Xavier’s College where he earned a degree in Mathematics and Physics. Afterwards, he earned another degree (also in mathematics) from Cambridge before going to MIT to get his PhD where he was supervised by the late Robert Solow. After graduation, he went to Berkeley, Oxford, Warwick and then Princeton where he’s been since 1981. Both the sheer number of contributions he has made to many fields, but also their influence, is incredible. I put in the title for this episode simply “Microeconomics” after his name, but that was a difficult decision as his work spans microeconomic theory, game theory, international trade, industrial organization, and public economics, just to name a few. I could’ve written any one of those and it would’ve still been inadequate. His recent work continues to address pressing global issues, such as optimal policies for green power generation and the dynamics of social, political, and economic institutions. He is an example of someone who follows his heart and his mind, even taking risks throughout his career to leave entire fields of inquiry in search of more questions.

In addition to his long list of scientific manuscripts, there have also been many influential books, both textbooks but also more ones aimed at a broader population of readers. Things like “Theory of International Trade” (with Victor Norman), “Investment Under Uncertainty” (with Robert Pindyck), “The Art of Strategy” (with Barry Nalebuff), and “Games of Strategy” (with Susan Skeath and David Reiley).

So I’ll stop there and turn it over to the show’s host — myself — and my guest, Dr. Dixit. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of “The Mixtape with Scott.” If you enjoy our conversation, please share the podcast and help us continue to bring you stories from the world of economics.

Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to this week’s episode of "The Mixtape with Scott”! This podcast is dedicated to capturing the personal stories of living economists and creating an oral history of the profession through these narratives. This week, I’m excited to welcome David Autor, an esteemed labor economist from MIT, where he serves as the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor, as well as the Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He was also last year's VP of the AEA, is on the Foreign Affairs board of the US State Department, and is a Digital Fellow at Stanford Digital Economy Lab. The number of accolades is too numerous to list, though, so I will just say that David's pioneering work in labor economics, particularly on the impact of trade, technological change, and the computerization of work, has significantly shaped and re-shaped our understanding of these critical areas.

David Autor is perhaps best known for his influential research on the economic impacts of globalization and technological advancements. His groundbreaking study with David Dorn and Gordon Hanson on the effects of Chinese trade on U.S. labor markets highlighted the deep and often painful economic adjustments faced by local labor markets exposed to import competition. Additionally, his work on the computerization of labor, including studies on skill-biased technological change, has provided crucial insights into how technological advancements reshape the labor market and wage structures.

One of the things you’ll learn in the interview, just as a teaser, is that David was mentored by Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, and that mentorship had a lasting effect. Not only did it changed his own human capital and trajectory, it seems also that it changed David’s own attitudes about mentorship. And although we couldn't delve into artificial intelligence in our conversation, Autor’s extensive research on the computerization of labor probably positions him as one of a handful of working economists at the moment whose voice will be kay in understanding the future intersections of AI and labor economics, and probably more than that. So with that I’ll stop, but thanks again to everyone for all your support. If you like the podcast, please share it!

Scott's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.