S1E32: Interview with Brigham Frandsen, Professor and Economist

** THE EARLIER PODCAST WAS MISSING TEN MINUTES SO I HAD TO REPOST **

Brigham Frandsen is a professor at BYU’s economics program. He did his undergrad at BYU double majoring in physics and economics where he coauthored two articles — one in physics on lasers, one on the distribution of income with his professor, the famed James McDonald. In this interview, we discuss a lot of things about his life, BYU’s own production function at producing future economists through careful and intensive mentoring of undergraduates, his time at MIT where he worked with Josh Angrist, and his own research as a labor economist and applied econometrician.

I found this to be a really enjoyable talk as I learned more about topics I really wasn’t expecting to learn about. I think one of the themes I see emerging in econometrics over the last few decades that is now becoming a little more salient to me as time passes is the issue of heterogenous treatment effects. Heterogenous treatment effects for instance is at the core of the local average treatment effect literature that Angrist and Imbens were involved in (as well as others at the time). You see it too in the problems with twoway fixed effects and difference-in-differences with staggered adoption. And it’s in Brigham’s work too — from his earliest paper with James McDonald on income distribution, to his newer work with Lars Lefgren on bounds. I think when the story is written, we will see that this heterogeneity and selection have been focal points for econometricians and applied researchers and Brigham will be one of many people I think who helped pushed that forward.

If you want to learn more from Brigham, you can though — he’s teaching a workshop on machine learning and causal inference at Mixtape Sessions Oct 27-28. You’ll get to pick up some python probably while you’re at it — a twofer!

Thanks for tuning in for the podcast. Apologies for the double posting on this — apparently my software refused to convert the MP4 video to more than 45 minutes no matter what I did. But I have a new workflow and it won’t happen again.