The Pie

By WBEZ & Becker Friedman Institute for Economics

What's The Pie about?

Economists are always talking about The Pie - how it grows and shrinks, how it’s sliced, and who gets the biggest shares. Join hosts Eduardo Porter and Tess Vigeland as they talk with leading economists from the University of Chicago and other experts about the most pressing matters of today. Hear how the economic pie is at the heart of issues like COVID-19 vaccine development, gender dynamics in the workplace, energy policy, jobs, and more.

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2023: An Economic Nudge for...

12.27.2022

Can ‘nudges’ improve your New Year’s resolutions? Today we’re looking back at one of our most popular episodes. Host Tess Vigeland sat down with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler in 2021 to discuss new material from his book, Nudge: The Final ...

The Pie episodes:

12.27.2022 2023: An Economic Nudge for the New Year Can ‘nudges’ improve your New Year’s resolutions? Today we’re looking back at one of our most popular episodes. Host Tess Vigeland sat down with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler in 2021 to discuss new material from his book, Nudge: The Final ...
12.13.2022 China Faltering? Why COVID Is Not Its Biggest Economic Problem How will China’s economy respond after the lifting of ‘Zero Covid’ policy? UChicago economist Chang-Tai Hsieh joins The Pie to discuss the surprising party response to political protests, emerging dynamics affecting the Chinese economy today, and what the future may ...
11.30.2022 Economic Warfare: Are Russian Sanctions Working? Ten months into a devastating war, the Russian and Ukrainian economies are struggling yet resilient. Russian-born economist Konstantin Sonin joins The Pie to provide an update on the economic impacts of the ongoing conflict, including the massive long-term toll not ...
11.15.2022 Fighting Inflation: Is the Fed’s Work Just Beginning? The Federal Reserve’s latest 75 basis point rate hike brought interest rates up again on everything from mortgages to car loans and credit cards. Will it be enough to halt inflation? How is the Fed thinking about the US economy, ...
11.01.2022 Tax vs Ban: The Unexpected Results on Gun Sales In this episode, we’re talking about guns. Chicago Booth economist Brad Shapiro has quantified—for the first time—American consumer demand for guns, and how that demand shifts in response to different regulations, including bans and taxes. He was surprised by some ...
10.18.2022 COVID and Schools: Elementary Lessons Did closing schools during the COVID-19 pandemic serve students and society at-large? As part of a World Bank Advisory Panel, University of Chicago economist Rachel Glennerster is taking a closer look at the long-term economic cost of learning losses. Addressing ...
10.04.2022 WFH… Gone Global The remote work revolution is now more than two years old, and it’s a worldwide phenomenon, at least in wealthier countries. Economist Steve Davis has been studying the staying power of work from home around the globe, and finds that ...
09.27.2022 We're Back with More of The Pie Last season, we were at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, effecting every aspect of our lives and the economy. So this season, we're back looking at the aftermath of the global pandemic and beyond — talking with economists from ...
03.30.2022 How Does Access to Safe Water Affect Child Mortality? A new meta-analysis by Michael Kremer and co-authors suggests water treatment could reduce child mortality by about 30% in low- and middle-income countries, making it a highly cost-effective treatment for saving lives. Kremer joined his co-author Stephen Luby to discuss ...
12.02.2021 Global Warming, Local Impact: The Economic Landscape of Climate Change Which economies will suffer most from global warming, and by just how much? Will others see benefits? The differences are key to understanding how the global economy will look in the coming years. Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and co-authors are using a ...
10.21.2021 Can Monetary Policy Solve Inflation and Unemployment? Inflation has spiked, even while the economy still recovers. What can the Fed do? It’s one of the biggest and most rapidly evolving questions facing macroeconomists today. In this Extra Slice of The Pie, Chicago Booth’s Christina Patterson provides a ...
08.05.2021 Nudge: The Final Edition Book Talk with Richard Thaler How can a small nudge make a big impact? Since publishing the first edition of Nudge more than 10 years ago, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have changed the way businesses and governments design rules and regulations to influence people’s ...
07.01.2021 Economics of Courage Economists and policymakers alike rely on the “value of a statistical life” to make important trade-offs. What are the merits of such a calculation? Can it be improved? Economists Michael Greenstone and Kyle Greenberg join to discuss groundbreaking research examining ...
06.17.2021 Vaccine Lotteries: Worth a Shot? More than a dozen states have announced large lotteries to incentivize vaccinations. On this episode, Steve Levitt and Jeff Severts examine the economics and likely outcomes of the policy strategy. Is this a lottery where everyone wins big? When it ...
06.03.2021 Pay Now or Pay Later With the rise in federal spending over the last several years, there are questions on how the US will pay those bills. Chicago Booth economists Austan Goolsbee and Eric Zwick demystify which rate changes actually impact revenue and expose how ...
05.20.2021 College Sports: Show Me The Money Division I schools make billions off athletic programs, with close to two-thirds coming from men’s basketball and football alone. Economist Matt Matt Notowidigdo has calculated that due to NCAA restrictions, only 7% of those revenues are paid to student athletes, ...
05.06.2021 Discrimination is Expensive Preventing people from entering careers where they could maximize their potential places massive costs on society, and economists can measure the real impact. Chang-Tai Hsieh and Erik Hurst have discovered that declining barriers to careers for women and Black men ...
04.22.2021 Are Carbon Offsets Bogus? Some of the world’s largest companies (and biggest emitters of CO2) boast big investments in carbon offset programs to reduce their reported carbon footprint. Do these programs work ? If so, for whom? Michael Greenstone and Barbara Haya join to ...
04.08.2021 WFH… Forever? The pandemic forced many Americans into a mass social experiment: working from home (WFH). Now, economists like Steve Davis are measuring the immediate and long-term impact of this massive shift. Davis and Kate Lister join this week to help us ...
03.25.2021 Incentives and the Race to Vaccinate With COVID-19 variants proliferating, administering vaccines as quickly as possible is a key policy priority. How can we ensure every level of the healthcare system pulls out all the stops in that pursuit? Joshua Gottlieb and David Pitrak join to ...
03.12.2021 Is the Future Cashless? When COVID lockdowns started a year ago, the use of cash plummeted. But the pandemic only accelerated a trend already underway. As we begin to emerge from global pandemic, is a fully cashless world on the horizon? Who benefits from ...
02.25.2021 The Surprising Results of Pandemic Unemployment Benefits In March 2020, the CARES Act expanded who was eligible for unemployment benefits, how much they could collect and for how long. Economists are now finding patterns in job searches and spending during this enormous expansion that seem to counter ...
02.11.2021 When Good Debt Goes Bad Nationally, student loan debt is at crisis level. The share of students behind on loan payments equals the share of homeowners in default at the peak of the housing crisis. What’s the best way to help students struggling under a ...
01.28.2021 Shots on Goal: How to Jumpstart the Economy Which economic policies must be prioritized now to get the best returns in the future? This week, The Pie is breaking out the crystal ball. Austan Goolsbee and Randall Kroszner share what economists are learning from the pandemic and what ...
01.14.2021 The Big Tech Threat? The expanding market influence of tech companies has sparked new fear of an old economic problem – monopoly power. In this episode, Eric Posner and Chad Syverson discuss whether these corporate giants pose potential risks to the world economy. How ...
12.30.2020 The Pandemic Recession’s Gender Gap Women suffered significantly in the early months of the current recession, raising important questions about the gender effects of this pandemic-fueled downturn. Yana Gallen and Heather Sarsons share research on labor force gender disparities and discuss the potential long-term implications ...
12.17.2020 A Vaccine for Billions The economic benefits of ending the COVID-19 pandemic even one day earlier are enormous. Michael Kremer and Canice Prendergast describe the urgency of vaccine delivery, the promise of production incentives, and why it pays to fail when developing a vaccine.
12.03.2020 Pre-existing Confusion: The US Health Insurance System The American health insurance system is complex, politically divisive, in need of reform, and facing a historic pandemic crisis. Economists Katherine Baicker and Matt Notowidigdo expose healthcare’s most urgent flaws and discuss potential remedies. Then, Dr. Stacy Lindau joins to ...
11.24.2020 The Pie Economists are always talking about The Pie - how it grows and shrinks, how it’s sliced, and who gets the biggest shares. Join hosts Eduardo Porter and Tess Vigeland as they talk with leading economists from the University of Chicago ...
11.12.2020 Introducing Verified: Dust Up Verified: Dust Up is a new investigative documentary podcast produced by Witness Docs that poses the question: Could a product so many of us have in our medicine cabinets be putting us at risk? In the second season of Verified, ...
11.05.2020 The Future of Money? If use of cash continues to wane, will cryptocurrency be the new dollar bill? Is it a revolution or just hype? Economists Eric Budish and Luigi Zingales join blockchain experts to help explain how Bitcoin functions and its implications for ...
10.22.2020 Who Needs Cash? When COVID lockdowns started, the use of cash plummeted. But the pandemic only accelerated a trend already underway. Is a fully cashless world on the horizon? Who benefits from using cash? Fernando Alvarez and Raghuram Rajan share research insights on ...
10.08.2020 The Health Care Conundrum, Part 2 The US pays roughly twice as much per person for healthcare as other wealthy nations. Yet Americans are in worse health. A group of leading health economists, physicians, and hospital administrators help explain the system’s striking inefficiencies and the difficult ...
09.24.2020 The Health Care Conundrum, Part 1 The global pandemic has revealed critical gaps and weaknesses in the US health care system. How is our system structured and how did we get here? In part one of our deep dive into the health care system, Katherine Baicker ...
09.10.2020 Climate vs. Development: The Global Dilemma How you experience the global energy crisis and climate change depends in large part on where you live. For this special deep dive episode, Michael Greenstone and Amir Jina discuss long-term research on one place – Bihar, India – and ...
08.27.2020 Can COVID Change the Climate? COVID-19 has prompted a significant decline in carbon emissions, accompanied by extraordinary economic cost. Professor Michael Greenstone discusses what energy economists are learning from the pandemic and how the trade-offs may be misinterpreted. If you’ve listened to Pandemic Economics this ...
08.20.2020 Uncovering the Politics of Mask Usage What does the 2016 election tell us about mask use in America? Quite a lot. Austin Wright draws on new research and what it can tell us about the relationship between partisanship and wearing a mask. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy ...
08.13.2020 The COVID Slide: Impact on Childhood You’ve likely heard of the summer slide in childhood learning. Will changes to education and toxic stress due to COVID-19 result in similar losses, especially for already disadvantaged children? John List and Dana Suskind share what evidence shows about the ...
08.06.2020 Navigating Uncertainty How can leaders make sound policy decisions with incomplete information? Lars Peter Hansen and Constantine Yannelis outline what economic theory offers to decision-makers dealing with uncertainty and what it says about COVID-19 policy to date. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
07.30.2020 How to Price A Vaccine? Under both pandemic and economic stress, how will the market perform when it comes to setting the price for effective treatments or a cure? Katherine Baicker and Richard Thaler explore the economic forces that drive production and distribution of necessary ...
07.23.2020 US & China: Relationship on the Rocks? Is COVID-19 complicating US-China relations? Zhiguo He and Chang-Tai Hsieh offer insight into how the current crisis has impacted existing dynamics between the world’s two largest economies. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
07.16.2020 The Holes in the Safety Net CARES Act funds quickly put cash in the hands of Americans affected by shutdown, but in many cases, relief didn’t reach minority and low-income workers who needed it most. Damon Jones discusses the inequalities in relief efforts and how the ...
07.09.2020 Stopping an Avalanche of Poverty One of the largest economic downturns in US history has not produced more poverty. What happened? Bruce Meyer describes how the federal government’s swift actions kept, or, in some cases, lifted families above the poverty line. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy ...
07.02.2020 The Virus is the Boss Is government policy driving consumer behavior or fear of infection? Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson share new research exploring this question, and why it matters for economic policy design. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
06.25.2020 The Lopsided Recession The current recession is not only unprecedented in its nature and scope, but also in its effects on industries, workers, and households. Veronica Guerrieri and Erik Hurst describe the unequal effects of this historic downturn, including how the cascading economic ...
06.17.2020 Meet the COVID-19 Consumer Consumer spending is one of the most important indicators of economic health. In this episode, Michael Weber and Constantine Yannelis share research insights on the effect of pandemic and federal stimulus policies on spending, and what these trends tell us ...
06.10.2020 Could the Fed’s Rescue Go Awry? Central banks are playing a critical, yet little discussed, role in limiting the economic damage of COVID-19. In this episode, Chicago Booth professor and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India Raghuram Rajan discusses how the pandemic is forcing ...
06.09.2020 Rethinking the Jobless Benefits Boost Under the CARES Act, two-thirds of eligible unemployed Americans can access unemployment insurance exceeding their prior earnings. Peter Ganong and Joseph Vavra discuss what this fact means for the unemployed, economic recovery from COVID-19, and how to improve the program ...
05.28.2020 Learning from South Korea's Success South Korea detected its first case of COVID-19 one day before the US, but rather than initiate lockdowns, it launched a program that shares location information on COVID-19 patients. Chang-Tai Hsieh discusses how South Korea limited COVID-19 deaths to 5.2 ...
05.14.2020 Jobs Lost and the Child Care Conundrum Since March, 22% of American workers lost their jobs. How can we begin to think about such an unprecedented deterioration in the labor market? Erik Hurst has studied who exactly has stopped collecting a paycheck and gives context to the ...

Older episodes

The Pie

What's The Pie about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Pie episodes:

2023: An Economic Nudge for the New Year

China Faltering? Why COVID Is Not Its Biggest Economic Problem

Economic Warfare: Are Russian Sanctions Working?

Fighting Inflation: Is the Fed’s Work Just Beginning?

Tax vs Ban: The Unexpected Results on Gun Sales

COVID and Schools: Elementary Lessons

WFH… Gone Global

We're Back with More of The Pie

How Does Access to Safe Water Affect Child Mortality?

Global Warming, Local Impact: The Economic Landscape of Climate Change

Can Monetary Policy Solve Inflation and Unemployment?

Nudge: The Final Edition Book Talk with Richard Thaler

Economics of Courage

Vaccine Lotteries: Worth a Shot?

Pay Now or Pay Later

College Sports: Show Me The Money

Discrimination is Expensive

Are Carbon Offsets Bogus?

WFH… Forever?

Incentives and the Race to Vaccinate

Is the Future Cashless?

The Surprising Results of Pandemic Unemployment Benefits

When Good Debt Goes Bad

Shots on Goal: How to Jumpstart the Economy

The Big Tech Threat?

The Pandemic Recession’s Gender Gap

A Vaccine for Billions

Pre-existing Confusion: The US Health Insurance System

The Pie

​Introducing Verified: Dust Up

The Future of Money?

Who Needs Cash?

The Health Care Conundrum, Part 2

The Health Care Conundrum, Part 1

Climate vs. Development: The Global Dilemma

Can COVID Change the Climate?

Uncovering the Politics of Mask Usage

The COVID Slide: Impact on Childhood

Navigating Uncertainty

How to Price A Vaccine?

US & China: Relationship on the Rocks?

The Holes in the Safety Net

Stopping an Avalanche of Poverty

The Virus is the Boss

The Lopsided Recession

Meet the COVID-19 Consumer

Could the Fed’s Rescue Go Awry?

Rethinking the Jobless Benefits Boost

Learning from South Korea's Success

Jobs Lost and the Child Care Conundrum

Introducing Verified: Dust Up