Welcome to the last podcast interview of 2024! This is the fourth season, 10th episode, which I guess puts us between 110-120 interviews so far. This week’s interview with an economist, learning more about their personal story, is Ted Joyce.

Ted is a Professor of Economics at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Health Economics program. He’s renowned for his contributions to demography and reproductive health policy and his work has appeared in top journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, New England Journal of Medicine, and Review of Economics and Statistics.

Ted has been a role model for me ever since I graduated in 2007, graciously corresponding with me, meeting with me at conferences, and talking to me about research and navigating the ropes. He was Mike Grossman’s student at CUNY, who I interviewed before and who is himself a very prominent health economist who was also one of Gary Becker’s first students. As my advisor, David Mustard, was also a Becker student, that makes me and Ted cousins. So it was nice having a family reunion for this interview.

Happy new year everyone. May you all be at ease, be at peace, be safe and be happy. 2025 here we come!

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! Episode 9, season 4. And I just did the math, and we are at 113 episodes so far since I started. What a fun journey it’s been too. So many interesting people, so many interesting stories, so much fun to connect with them and be, for just one hour, getting to hear them all.

For those new to the podcast, this is a podcast about the personal stories of living economists where I listen to them share parts of the arc of their journey. Primarily as their life moving towards being an economist and having been one. It moves between the personal and professional in whatever way feels right at the moment. And this week’s guest is Francine Blau. Dr. Blau is the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and she’s had a long and prolific career studying two overlapping topics — labor economics and the gender wage gap. She is, if I can say it, the labor economist’s labor economist. Deep labor economics, relevant, empirical, pioneering. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be in the room with her at SOLE meetings and seminars from the very start.

In the interview, we learn a lot about her life. We discussed what it was like at Harvard in the early 1970s, why she chose Harvard over MIT, her father’s difficult story as a teacher in the NYC during a difficult time in US political history involving the unions, certain university’s bans on allowing women into their PhD programs (e.g., Princeton), and the importance that Richard Freeman had on her committee in what she ultimately ended up writing a dissertation on, which I’ll explain in a moment. I promised her an hour, so some of the things I’d wanted to ask, like how she saw the credibility revolution emerge around her, I never got to get to. But I loved what we did get to cover, and wish I had had another hour with her.

If I can geek out for just a moment, this is a bit of a longer opener as I normally write, but Francine Blau was truly a pioneer and I’ll just mention one thing — her dissertation. I kind of knew that she was a pioneer because I knew about her full body of work, which is frankly gigantic, which was why I wanted to interview her in the first place, but to be honest, I really didn’t know the start and that context at all. I think it’s fair to say that she was one of the very first economists to be focused on the gender wage gap. I think maybe Claudia Goldin, which I’ll mention in a second, would be an exception in that perhaps it’s a tie between them. There had been obviously work on the economics of discrimination; that had been Gary Becker’s dissertation topic at the University of Chicago in 1955. And Dr. Blau suggested that both Claudia Goldin and Yoram Ben-Porath had also worked on that, but in terms of timing, I think that Dr. Blau predates Ben-Porath but not necessarily Dr. Goldin. Dr. Goldin’s first publication on the gender differences is a 1977 article in the Journal of Economic History entitled “Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 to 1880” and I don’t think anything Dr. Ben-Porath wrote when Dr. Blau had graduated in 1975 from Harvard. Probably of those two, it would be Goldin’s JEH that would be the closest to something as in-depth and which had comparable calendar date timing as to what and when Dr. Blau published her dissertation (as a book in 1977), but very different in that it was contemporary, not historical, and it concerned women in the modern work place, and specifically within the firm itself.

Dr. Blau’s dissertation was unlike the current style of dissertations which is the “three essay” model. It was a book length dissertation which she published in 1977 entitled Equal Pay in the Office. It was a 1975 dissertation that far predates the work that would come much later on the personnel economics literature we associate with Ed Lazear and Sherwin Rosen. Her dissertation explores many topics that would’ve perfectly fit into that material, but predates it by maybe 10 years arguably, and focuses intently on gender wage disparities between male and female office workers in the United States. She in that dissertation, written partly under the guidance of the labor economist Richard Freeman, examined the extent of wage differentials in the office place, explores the factors contributing to these disparities, and evaluates the effectiveness of equal pay legislation in addressing gender-based wage inequality. I found a copy of it, which I think may be out of print, and am ordering it now, but from what I have been able to gather, it was way ahead of its time, and I mean that.

Dr. Blau is a role model for many people, myself included. The steady march of her career, the consistency, the work ethic, the creativity — it’s the hallmark of a great economist and great scholar. I asked her how she managed to do it and it was interesting what she told me — she attributed a desire to not let down her coauthors as part of how she’s managed to maintain that steady body of work for the last 50 years. That’s a lesson I’m going to try to remember going forward.

This is again a great interview to share. Share with friends, family, students and colleagues, mentors, people outside economics, people inside economics. I was very inspired by the interview and hope you are 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.

Welcome to the latest episode of The Mixtape with Scott! This week’s guest on the podcast is Jann Spiess. Many of you probably know Jann from his work with Kirill Borusyak and Xavier Jaravel on diff-in-diff. Others may know him for his work on machine learning. Now you get to know him for a third reason which is contained on this podcast!

Jann is an assistant professor at Stanford. He’s one of a younger cohort of talented econometricians who have been making practically helpful contributions to the toolkit in causal inference and machine learning, including work on synthetic control with Guido Imbens and much more. This was a great interview and I learned a lot about Jann I didn’t know about. And I hope you enjoy it it too!

Thanks again for all your support! Share this video or podcast with whoever you think would like it!

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 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.

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 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.