S3E5: Chris Taber, Labor Economist, Wisconsin

This week’s guest on the Mixtape with Scott is Christopher Taber. Chris is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin where he is department chair, the James Heckman professor of economics and the Walker Family chair. Chris is a labor economist and econometrician who has made numerous contributions to both areas such as the returns to education, difference-in-differences with small numbers of interventions, techniques for evaluating claims of selection on observables and more. In addition to fitting into my long running interest in econometrics and labor economics, though, I wanted to talk with Chris because this year I’m wanting to interview more “the students of [BLANK].” And Chris was Jim Heckman’s student as a grad student at the University of Chicago and this year in addition to interviewing the students of Orley, Card, Angrist and Imbens, I am also want to interview the students of Jim Heckman as I continue to flesh out the causal inference revolution that began in labor economics in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s at Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Chicago and Berkeley. Thanks for tuning in! I hope you enjoy this chance to listen to Chris’s story as much as I did.