Mixtape: the Podcast

Telling the story of modern economics through interviews with economists

I’ve been doing interviews with economists now for a couple of years. Usually these are interviews with authors of recent Journal of Human Resources articles (called #JHR_Threads), but more recently they’ve branched into topics I’ve been considering doing as I contemplate a second book project. One of them is a series of interviews with the Princeton Industrial Relations tradition from circa late 1970s and mid 1980s. That’s people like David Card, Josh Angrist, Orley Ashenfelter, Janet Currie, Philip Levine, Jörn-Steffen Pischke, but also their collaborators like Guido Imbens, Don Rubin and the broader design-based causal inference econometricians like Alberto Abadie and contemporary econometricians in difference-in-differences and so forth. But I’m also very interested in a series of interviews with economists in tech, specifically what I call the “architects” of the auctions that basically support the entire internet — Hal Varian at Google, Susan Athey at Microsoft, Preston McAfee at Yahoo. But also Chief Economists like Pat Bajari, John List and more. I use these interviews as projects to learn the stories of modern economists as I think modern economics is primarily that of economists, all of whom are real people with real lives and I enjoy hearing that and think others will as well.

So with that said, let me now introduce Mixtape: the Podcast, which is available at Spotify and who knows, once I learn the ropes, probably I have to set it up other places too. The inaugural episode is the one I did the other day with Orley Ashenfelter, and I hope you like hearing it on Spotify. I also have one with John List up, and will be adding a few older ones. Apologies for the sound quality on these. I didn’t have a microphone and am still learning my way around this sort of thing, but I’ll get there. Enjoy!