The Mixtape with Scott

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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

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Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott. One of the new themes I’m hoping to pursue is the students of the 2021 winners of the Nobel Prize. And today’s interview is with Marianne Bitler, professor of economics at University of California Davis. Dr. Bitler was in the first cohort of Josh Angrist’s PhD advisees at MIT. She graduated in 1998 from MIT where Angrist was one of her advisors before going into a career in government. She took the long way to get into academia, moving through UC Irvine and landing at UC Davis. Her career has been marked by an interest in means tested poverty programs as well as reproductive health, but it’s also been marked by early interest in heterogenous treatment effects from a methodological perspective, making her contributions some of the earlier work that I think highlights some of the challenges we face when focusing exclusively on means. It was a pleasure talking to Marianne and I hope all of you find this as interesting to listen to as I did. Thanks again for tuning in!

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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!

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Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! A podcast devoted to the personal stories of living economists and relaying an oral history of the profession (or at least a selected oral history of a selected part of the profession). Still working on an easy to say phrase that combines those two ideas of the micro and the macro. Anyway, today is part of the longer series on econometricians, and I am pleased to have on the show Bruce Hansen, the Mary Claire Aschenbrener Phipps Distinguished Chair and the Trygve Haavelmo Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. Bruce has been a prolific and highly impactful econometrician for decades now, as well as the author of two new books. The first is an econometrics textbook that all of you should check out, especially if you’re teaching econometrics and especially if you’re taking econometrics, and especially if you’re wanting to learn more econometrics. So I guess that’s to say, especially if you are interested in what I do on this substack. The second book is a book on probability and statistics and I would say that book also is for those three groups of people, but also add to it people who teach probability and statistics and want to have a stronger background in this subjects. For years, Bruce provided both books for free on his website, and it was a real inspiration for me to do the same with my book. Bruce and I discussed a lot about his career, including the large changes that happened in econometrics starting in the 1990s and early 2000s, which he suggested was monumental in a lot of ways. I won’t spoil it. So thank you for tuning in and I hope you enjoy today’s interview as much as I did!

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This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is Christopher Taber. Chris is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin where he is department chair, the James Heckman professor of economics and the Walker Family chair. Chris is a labor economist and econometrician who has made numerous contributions to both areas such as the returns to education, difference-in-differences with small numbers of interventions, techniques for evaluating claims of selection on observables and more. In addition to fitting into my long running interest in econometrics and labor economics, though, I wanted to talk with Chris because this year I’m wanting to interview more “the students of [BLANK].” And Chris was Jim Heckman’s student as a grad student at the University of Chicago and this year in addition to interviewing the students of Orley, Card, Angrist and Imbens, I am also want to interview the students of Jim Heckman as I continue to flesh out the causal inference revolution that began in labor economics in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s at Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Chicago and Berkeley. Thanks for tuning in! I hope you enjoy this chance to listen to Chris’s story as much as I did.

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Welcome to another episode of the Mixtape with Scott! This week I have a guest who some of you know, and some of you don’t know (I suppose making them no different than anyone else) — Andrew Baker. Andrew is now an assistant professor in the law school at the University of California Berkeley. He specializes in topics at the intersection of law, policy and finance. And one of his papers, “How Much Should We Trust Staggered Difference-In-Differences Estimates?”, published in the Journal of Financial Economics, was the winner of the Jensen Prize for the best paper published in Corporate Finance. He is for many people permanently part of the last five year’s or so “credibility crisis in difference-in-differences” for both this paper, as well as other things he’s written and done. So I thought it would be great to have him on the show as part of the larger material on causal inference in economics.

But Andrew is not an economist. He has a joint JD/PHD from Stanford, but the PhD is in Business Administration with a special focus on accounting. I nonetheless included him in this series as part of the “story of economics” because like Carlos Celinni last week’s guest, Andrew started out in economics as an undergraduate at Georgetown, then went to work for an economic consulting firm, then did a predoc with John Donohue III, professor of law at Stanford and PhD economist from Yale. But then he instead went into Stanford’s law school before migrating into their doctoral program in business administration. And I thought this kind of story — the story of people staying in, but also of people exiting — is really a part of the larger economics story too. It’s still somewhat challenging to find these stories, so I’m going to keep trying, but I wanted to if I could by circling people who I knew it applied to.

But, as with others, the point of Andrew being a guest on the show is simply because I think he does have an interesting story, and I wanted to hear it. I hope others of you hear it too. Thanks again for tuning into the podcast. Please like share etc!

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