Advanced Transcript: Interview with Maya Rossin-Slater of Stanford University

I am going to I think post the advanced transcript the Tuesday before the podcast episode not the day before. That way Tuesday’s are always a new release but subscribers get the transcript.

Today’s transcript is with Maya Rossin-Slater, a professor and health economist at Stanford in the health policy program within Stanford’s med school. I wanted to reach out to Maya for, as always, two reasons, the first being I have been interested in Mayas work for a long time. She is an empirical economist and a prolific one who regularly studies on the intersection of labor and health (eg her work on paid leave) as well as topics on maternal and child health. She has two new papers, one R&R at Restud and the other R&R at AER on school shootings and disease, respectively, that I had hoped to ask her about, but I disn’t get to it because instead we talked about her recent paper on ADHD diagnoses among between “distant” family members (ie cousins). And it’s a causal study — one cousins diagnosis causing another cousins diagnosis — using Swedish administrative data with the “young for your grade” RD design, which I’ve always found interesting.

But the other reason I wanted to talk with Maya is that she is part of the larger credibility revolution story I’ve been pursuing where I focus on the Princeton Industrial Relations Section. Maya went to Columbia, not Princeton, but she is still a “grandchild of the revolution” and a great grandchild too, bc her advisor was Janet Currie, when Janet was chair at Columbia, and Janet was an Orley and Card student. These genealogies are to me a crucial part of the larger story about how the revolution spread and as Maya is high ability, she has always been selected by top schools in the labor markets carrying these influences embedded in her human capital with her — first to UC Santa Barbara’s Econ dept, then Stanford’s med school, where at both places she has continued at breakneck pace to create an impactful, impressive body of work on health and labor.

So with that said, here is the transcript. Thank you again supporters for all your support. I hope to dig myself out of my work related holes and provide more bonus content on econometrics too. Just need to figure out how to deal with my guilt for pay walling things but I’m getting there.