Welcome back to The Mixtape with Scott. I’m currently in the process of putting together a new slate of interviews, and while it’s not quite ready yet, I didn’t want to leave you hanging. So in the meantime, I’m re-sharing some conversations from earlier seasons — episodes that I think are worth revisiting or perhaps discovering for the first time.

Today’s rerun is from Season Two, and it’s one of my favorite interviews from that time: my conversation with Ariel Pakes, the Thomas Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

This was such a fun and rich interview. People either know Dr. Pakes very well or only by the letter “P”. He’s a towering figure in industrial organization and structural econometrics, with landmark contributions both theoretical and applied. Among many things, he’s the “P” in the Berry-Levinsohn-Pakes model — BLP — which remains one of the most influential tools for estimating demand in differentiated product markets. That paper — Automobile Prices in Market Equilibrium — published in Econometrica in 1995, has had a ripple effect not just in economics, but well beyond it.

But this interview wasn’t just about methods and models. Dr. Pakes and I talked about basketball, about growing up in a radical socialist youth group, about his early love of philosophy, and his own path through Harvard as a young man trying to straddle economics and philosophy before finding his place. He spoke softly, with depth and reflection, and he offered a glimpse into how he works — by getting himself in way over his head and then slowly, patiently, working his way out. It’s a way of thinking that hasn’t just shaped his own work but has helped shape the rest of ours too.

I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

Greetings from Cambridge! I’m still mid-move and not fully settled—classes kick off next week and I’m wrapping the last bits of admin—so I’m sharing one more rerun before we close out Season 4.

Today’s guest is a Cambridge neighbor just down the Charles at MIT: Dr. Amy Finkelstein, John Bates Clark Award–winning economist.

If you’re new to her work: Amy is a leading health economist at MIT and coauthor of We’ve Got You Covered (with Liran Einav), a timely book from a couple of years ago. In it, they argue for universal basic coverage that guarantees financial protection from major medical costs, while leaving room for supplemental private insurance—simple, fair, and focused on what insurance is actually for.

In our conversation we cover the Oregon Medicaid Experiment and the ideas that shaped it, plus the arc of her career. I loved this one. Hope you enjoy the rerun.

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Greetings everyone. I’m still in moving mode, packing up life in Texas and getting ready for a year in Boston. I hit the road on Friday of this week for a three day road trip and am still behind on everything. That means the podcast is still on reruns for now, but I should have a new episode for you next time. This week’s rerun is one I really liked, though—my conversation from two years ago with Steven Berry.

Steven is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale and the inaugural Faculty Director of the Tobin Center. His work in industrial organization has shaped how economists think about markets in equilibrium, and his research spans industries from autos to airlines to media. He’s also a winner of the Frisch Medal, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and one of the field’s most respected voices.

We talked about his path into economics—from the Midwest, to Wisconsin, to a career that’s helped define modern empirical IO. Naturally, we dug into the BLP model, the landmark framework he developed with James Levinsohn and Ariel Pakes that changed how we estimate demand in differentiated product markets. It’s one of those ideas that’s both deeply technical and hugely practical in policy and business.

If you missed it the first time, I think you’ll enjoy hearing Steven reflect on his career, his collaborators, and where the field is headed. Here’s my rerun conversation with Steven Berry.

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I’m still going through some older reruns for the summer due to my travel schedule. This one is an interview with Rocío Titiunik, a quantitative methods political scientist and professor in the department of politics at Princeton University, as well as a researcher that has been at the frontier of work on regression discontinuity designs.

Her name is synonymous with cutting-edge work on regression discontinuity design, developed in close collaboration with scholars like Sebastián Calonico, Matías Cattaneo, and Max Farrell. Together, they’ve shaped the modern landscape of causal inference, not only through groundbreaking theory but also through widely used software tools in R, Stata, and Python. In addition to her contributions to quantitative methodology, Rocío’s applied research — from electoral behavior to democratic institutions — has become a major voice in political science. She also holds a formidable editorial footprint: associate editor for Science Advances, Political Analysis, and the American Journal of Political Science, and APSR. It’s no exaggeration to say she helps steer the field as much as she contributes to it.

In this older interview, Rocío shared how her journey into economics began not with data, but with theory, literature, and the big questions that led her to the discipline. Her path into Berkeley’s PhD program in agricultural and resource economics was anything but linear, and even once there, she wasn’t sure how all the parts of herself — the scholar, the immigrant, the thinker — would fit together. During our conversation, she opened up about moments of uncertainty, of feeling lost in the sheer vastness of academic economics. Her honesty was disarming. It reminded me that no matter how decorated someone’s résumé may be, we’re all just trying to find our way — and sometimes, the most important breakthroughs happen when we admit we haven’t arrived yet.

Thanks again for tuning in! I hope you like listening to this older podcast interview.

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Greetings from San Sebastián Spain where I am on holiday with my daughter for another couple of weeks. I have still not done any new podcasts as I realized only after I left that I did not pack my microphone. And, I didn’t want to buy a new one, and I wasn’t really 100% positive if using my Apple AirPods would work well. All of that is to say — excuses.

So, this week we are going back down memory lane to an interview I did 1-2 years ago with one of my favorite young up and coming econometricians, Tymon Słoczyńsi from Brandeis University. Tymon is the author of a wonderful 2022 article on OLS models with, I’ll call it, “additive and separable” covariates under unconfoundedness. Autocorrect wanted that to be “addictive” instead of “additive”, which would’ve been a really clever Freudian slip.

Tymon’s interview was one of my favorites. I know I say that about every interview, but they all feel like that, but let’s just this one really really feels that way. And I think you’ll feel the same way.

One of the things I love about Tymon’s articles is how excellent the writing is. His paragraphs oftentimes feel like the kind of paragraphs that you can tell he wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote, and rewrote like a hundred times. It amazes me that English is not his first language and he writes this well. I don’t even mean this clear — I mean it’s beautiful writing. Here’s a paragraph I think is outstanding, for instance:

“To aid intuition for this surprising result, recall that an important motivation for using the model in equation (1) and OLS is that the linear projection of y on d and X provides the best linear predictor of y given d and X (Angrist & Pischke, 2009). However, if our goal is to conduct causal inference, then this is not, in fact, a good reason to use this method. Ordinary least squares is “best” in predicting actual outcomes, but causal inference is about predicting missing outcomes, defined as ym = y(1) × (1− d ) + y(0) × d. In other words, the OLS weights are optimal for predicting “what is.” Instead, we are interested in predicting “what would be” if treatment were assigned differently.”

A lot of his sentences are sentences that are so precise, so insightful, that I wish I could have written it. It’s superb, he’s superb, and if you haven’t listened to this, I hope you do, and if you already have listened to it, then I hope you listen to it again.

Thanks again for all your support. Wish me luck as I wrap up my summer in Europe, start making my plans to move to Boston, teach new students, meet new colleagues, and make new friends. And get some new clothes to replace the ones the gentleman who stole my luggage on the train in Switzerland is now in possession of.

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Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott — an interview-based podcast where I, Scott Cunningham, talk to living economists about their personal lives. I continue my travels in Europe without a good microphone, which has caused me to delay my newest interviews a little bit longer. Therefore this week’s episode is an oldie but a goodie — Jon Roth, a young econometrician at Brown University. Jon has had many high profile publications to his name already in a short period of time, many of which center around difference-in-differences. Several have focused on the event study (e.g., here, here and here) , whereas others have focused on the logarithm both within diff-in-diff but also outside of it. I think it is fair to say that Jon’s econometric contributions have been unusually practical to applied researchers while also scientifically robust and accurate. I remember enjoying this conversation with Jon a great deal, and if you haven’t listened to it, it’s a great time to do so now, and if you have listened to it, it’s a great time to listen to it again! Thank you again for all your support!

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This week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott is a rerun of an earlier interview I did with Muhammad Akbarpour, an economic theorist at Stanford University. Muhammad tells his life story of growing up in Tehan, Iran and his long and windy road into economics and Stanford University, where he both went to grad school and is now an assistant professor. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to it or watch it, I highly recommend it again. Mohammad is one of my favorite young economists, particularly theorists, working today and I find talking to him to be really inspiring. This was one of my favorite, top 5 even, interviews I’ve had on the show so far too.

Thank you again for your support.

Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.