Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott where I get to interview Bruce Sacerdote, the Richard S. Braddock 1963 Professor in Economics at Dartmouth. Bruce is a prolific labor economist whose work spans the range of crime, education and peer effects. Some of his papers have been some of my favorite, even. His early work on crime with Ed Glaeser used to really interest me. But it was his work on peer effects that I found really fascinating. This old paper in the QJE about how friendships form I must have read almost 20 years and it still sticks in my head.

I think Bruce, though, was one of the first people that I ever encountered after graduating that was very clearly part of this credibility revolution. His papers, if it used instruments, typically would use lotteries as instruments. Or if he was studying peer effects, it was lotteries. Well, not surprisingly, Bruce was there at Harvard as a PhD student in the first class that Imbens co-taught with Don Rubin on causal inference. His classmates in that class were Rajeev Dehejia and Sadek Wahba, authors of classic applied papers on the propensity score. In fact, Bruce’s own project for that class was also published — a paper estimating the causal effect of winning lottery prizes on labor market outcomes (published in the 2001 AER). So this was fun, and I hope you enjoy it too. Apologies I ramble for so long at the start. Not sure what got into me.

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This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is someone I’ve admired for a very long time, even before I entered graduate school in 2002. Peter J. Boettke is the Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, the Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. It’s hard to summarize just how important Peter has been to the story of Austrian economics, but in my mind, he’s been one of the most influential people in that long tradition, both for his scholarly work on political economy, public choice and institutions, his leadership at George Mason, where the Austrian tradition has continued to thrive, and as a mentor to young people.

I can only speak to myself, but I have looked up to Peter for a very long time as it was always very clear that he was a humble and serious scholar who also gave an incredible amount of time and mentorship to his students. All of those are to me examples of what I find to characterize some of the best of the profession’s larger story, and so it was a real pleasure for him to sit down with me to talk about his career. I found it so interesting to hear his story in his own words, the economists he looked up to as a young person, his genuine love of economics, as a field, and how much he holds up his students and colleagues. Thank you, as always, for taking the to tune in. I hope you enjoy this time with Peter as much as I did.

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This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is Jesse Rothstein, the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Public Policy at UC-Berkeley and the Faculty Director of the California Policy Lab. Jesse has a long list of things to which he’s made meaningful contributions, ranging from labor economics, to discrimination, to education, to causal inference and more. He’s also one of the “students of David Card” guests that I wanted to have on the podcast, as Card was his adviser way back in the day. For those curious about the paper we are talking about towards the end (“augmented synthetic control”), it’s one of my favorites in the synthetic control literature. The link to it is here. Good luck everyone this week and thanks for tuning is as always!

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Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott! We are getting closer to the hundredth episode! This is our 91st interview if I include Adam Smith (played by ChatGPT-4), which I absolutely will be counting. And the guest is someone I have admired for a long time — Martin Gaynor, or “Marty”. Marty is the J. Barone University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon both in the economics department and their policy school, Heinz College. But he is also special adviser to Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the federal Department of Justice, and it is not the first time that Marty has served in government as a public servant. He is also a former Director of the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. You can read some about his new position in the Department of Justice here.

Marty works on the supply side of health, you might say, as opposed to the demand side. He studies markets and concentration, hospitals, firm competition, pricing — not just our health behaviors, but also the supply of healthcare through a mixture of market and non-market processes. If you go through his vita, you can see he’s racked up a lot of awards and publications over the years.

There are many things you can say about Marty, and after this interview, two came to mind — resilient and kind. It was actually almost not the case that he would become as successful as an economist as he became, as he will share in this interview. He struggled initially to get a tenure track job, and even left academia briefly as a result. He is remarkably upbeat and realistic about the good fortune that he has had, though. And as you will see in this interview, it is very clear that he is a genuinely kind and warm hearted person.

Marty also is a survivor in a more literal sense. He was nearly murdered in the antisemitic terrorist attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. That is his story to tell in this interview, not mine, but I will leave it at that.

All of our stories matter. No matter who is listening or reading this, their personal story matters, and I hope that this interview is interesting and that you enjoy getting to know Marty a bit better. Thank you for all your support!

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Welcome to the 12th episode of the third season of the Mixtape with Scott, a podcast devoted to listening to the stories of living economists. This week's guest is Daniel Chen, an economist at the Toulouse School of Economics. I had a chance to meet Daniel when he came to Baylor and presented to use a tour de force of his body of scholarship, and I was mesmerized by it. Except for one other person, I had not met someone with that level of productive scholarly energy before. I was really stunned by how much work he had crammed into a career, spreading so many topics, and yet all held together under this umbrella of "political economy".

I knew of many of Daniel's works by reputation and one in particular we discuss which is about a law and economics program that trained federal judges, but I hadn't met him before, and I did not put two and two together that he had gone to MIT and had on his committee Bannerjee, Duflo, Kremer and Angrist -- four key Nobel laureates in the history of causal inference and the natural experiment movement that really captured the profession. So I asked him if we could talk and I could hear his story and he agreed.

Daniel will share it in this talk as we go through the kind of kid he was, and probably frankly still is, a deeply curious, very meticulous, thoughtful, and creative person. We talked about his childhood, majoring in applied math at Harvard, being very drawn to theory and yet people, making economics a surprising and unexpected opportunity for him, and eventually becoming what he told me was a "data rat" who collected datasets.

He also fits with this other part of the professional story that I’ve been wanting to share with people which are these economists that also go to law school and JDs. He after finishing MIT decided to get a JD at Harvard law school, and his explanation for it is kind of interesting because it all feels somehow unplanned and yet clearly he is, in my opinion anyway, driven by his own goals. I loved meeting him, loved talking to him, loved listening to his story, and I hope you do too! Thank you for tuning in as always!

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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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