Economics Amplified

Podcast note: Please enjoy this episode from season two of The Pie, an economics podcast from the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics. Subscribe where you get your podcasts, or at thepie.uchicago.edu. Ten months into a devastating war, the Russian and Ukrainian economies are struggling yet resilient. Russian-born economist Konstantin Sonin joins The Pie to provide an update on the economic impacts of the ongoing conflict, including the massive long-term toll not yet captured in available data.

Podcast note: Please enjoy this episode from season two of The Pie, an economics podcast from the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics. Subscribe where you get your podcasts, or at thepie.uchicago.edu. The Federal Reserve’s latest 75 basis point rate hike brought interest rates up again on everything from mortgages to car loans and credit cards. Will it be enough to halt inflation? How is the Fed thinking about the US economy, unemployment, and its global impact? University of Chicago economist Anil Kashyap joins to discuss the campaign to bring inflation down and mounting pressure on the central bank.

Podcast note: Please enjoy this episode from season two of The Pie, an economics podcast from the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics. Subscribe where you get your podcasts, or at thepie.uchicago.edu. In this episode, we’re talking about guns. Chicago Booth economist Brad Shapiro has quantified—for the first time—American consumer demand for guns, and how that demand shifts in response to different regulations, including bans and taxes. He was surprised by some of the findings, which offer new and important insights for ongoing gun policy debates.

Podcast Note: Please enjoy this episode from season two of The Pie, an economics podcast from the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics. Subscribe where you get your podcasts, or at thepie.uchicago.edu. Did closing schools during the COVID-19 pandemic serve students and society at-large? As part of a World Bank Advisory Panel, University of Chicago economist Rachel Glennerster is taking a closer look at the long-term economic cost of learning losses. Addressing these costs, estimated at greater than $10 trillion, will be crucial to future education policy and pandemic response.

Podcast Note: Please enjoy episode one from season two of The Pie, an economics podcast from the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics. Subscribe where you get your podcasts, or at thepie.uchicago.edu. In this episode, we talk about the remote work revolution. It is now more than two years old, and it’s a worldwide phenomenon, at least in wealthier countries. Economist Steve Davis has been studying the staying power of work from home around the globe, and finds that not only is it here to stay, but it’s prompting larger societal questions about everything from worker power to the viability of urban city centers.

The United States is facing a range of challenging policy issues, from trade to inequality to climate change. The good news is that academic economists are doing cutting-edge work to help solve the challenges of the day, at the University of Chicago and institutions around the world. Over the past 20 years, there has been increasing momentum toward evidence-informed policymaking. While this seems promising, barriers still exist to bridging the divide between academia and government. On November 19, the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) welcomed MIT Professor of Economics Abhijit Banerjee, recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics and co-author of the forthcoming book, Good Economics for Hard Times. Banerjee joined a panel of experts, including UChicago’s Katherine Baicker, Michael Greenstone and Steve Levitt, along with the Obama Foundation’s Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, to share their experiences and perspectives on the potential for economics to improve policy outcomes, the obstacles that exis

The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI), the Chicago Economics Society (CES), and the Booth Alumni Club of Washington, DC, welcomed Chang-Tai Hsieh, Phyllis and Irwin Winkelried Professor Of Economics, Chicago Booth School of Business, for cocktails and a conversation on Crony Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. David Rank, former Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge’ d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in China, moderated a discussion following Professor Hsieh’s remarks. Professor Hsieh discussed how China’s fast-paced growth over the past three decades is one of the most remarkable events in world economic history. This growth was fueled by the introduction of pro-market policies, especially in agriculture and trade. However, China’s national institutions continue to restrict property rights and hinder private business development, among other obstructive policies. To counter those forces, China has developed a system of crony capitalism at the local level that has allowed businesses to thrive. Pol

When faced with debt across multiple credit cards, do people pay down their balances in a way that makes financial sense? On February 1, BFI hosted Chicago Booth Professor Neale Mahoney for a Friedman Forum luncheon lecture on his recent working paper, “How Do Individuals Repay Their Debt? The Balance-Matching Heuristic.” In the paper, Professor Mahoney and his colleagues examine how credit card holders in the United Kingdom divide their payments between credit card balances. Instead of paying down the card with the highest interest rate first, the authors find people make payments based on the size of the balances on each credit card. These findings reveal the large gap between the optimal way to repay debt, and reality of how people repay their credit card debt.

Traditional economics assumes rational actors. In daily decision-making, however, we all make decisions influenced by our biases and beliefs, whether which car to buy or who to vote for at the polls. As a result, outcomes often deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economics. Combining discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of economics – including incentives and market behavior – Booth Professor Richard Thaler, recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics, and Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein, recipient of the 2018 Holberg Prize and former Administrator of the White House Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs, have revolutionized our understanding of how human behaviors can impact markets. Their work highlights opportunities to drive decision-making in a direction that improves outcomes for businesses, government, and society as a whole. The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics welcomed Thaler and Sunstein, authors of the best-selling book "Nudge:

Chicago Booth Professor Steve Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, discussed modern data science techniques at BFI's latest Becker Brown Bag talk.

In this episode, Murphy talks with Nancy Stokey, The Frederick Henry Prince Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, about the transformative effects that technology has on economies.

Richard Evans is a Senior Fellow in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago, and Fellow here at the institute. Evans sees immense potential in the methods, practices, and even workflows that computer engineers have implemented in their own discipline, and is working to bring those skills into Chicago economics through his role both here at the institute and via the Masters in Computational Social Science, a graduate program he’s a part of. Evans spoke to us about how we can expect to see computation shape different aspects of economic study, as well as the ways that computer scientists and software engineers can teach economists how to work smarter. Music in this episode:— Auscultation: https://auscultation.bandcamp.com/album/spiritland Boris Mann 2: https://soundcloud.com/boriscloud/acid-jazz-sunday

Edward P. Lazear is a labor economist and a founder of the field known as personnel economics. His research centers on employee incentives, promotions, compensation and productivity in firms. In this episode, Lazear and Kevin Murphy talk about the legacy of human capital and labor economics at the University of Chicago, as well Lazear’s experience crossing from academia to the Council of Economic Advisers and back again.

Amanda Agan is interested in the ways that laws and regulations play out in the real world, often yielding unintended consequences. She visited the institute this spring and spoke about her recent work to evaluate policies that eliminate questions about previous criminal convictions from job applications Advocates of these “Ban the Box” policies have argued that these laws could increase employment for minorities, but some economic theories imply that they could have negative consequences for minorities without records. Agan and her coauthors designed a field experiment to see if the policy performs as intended.

In this episode, Kevin Murphy talks with Casey Mulligan, professor in economics at the University of Chicago. Mulligan examines microeconomic trends, including labor, through a macroeconomic lens, with a particular interest in how policy can inadvertently shape the labor market in unexpected ways.

Manasi Deshpande is an emerging expert in how social insurance programs shape the outcomes of their recipients. In this episode, she and Kevin Murphy discuss the importance of empirical measurement of such programs over a lifetime and how those effects shape the recipients' labor response. The pair talk about the ways that economists bring a unique framework to public policy in order to better measure the efficacy of what a policy is trying to do.

In this episode, Murphy gets concrete with Chad Syverson, the J. Baum Harris Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth, about how his engineering background influences his approach to economics, understanding the drivers of productivity, how it is measured, and what can be gleaned from past growth trends in predicting what may come.

In this episode, Murphy and Muhammad Akbarpour, a Becker Friedman Institute Research Fellow, examine the opportunities that surround the development of an international kidney exchange market, the obstacles that inhibit that market from being implemented, and the experience of being an early career scholar at the University of Chicago.

In this episode, Murphy and José Scheinkman, a former UChicago faculty member and department chair now at Columbia University and Princeton University, elaborate on the experience of being an economist at the University of Chicago, evaluate recent trends in the global economy, and highlight ways in which economic thinking can more broadly be applied to a wide range of problems and solutions.

In this episode, Murphy talks with Erik Hurst, V. Duane Rath Professor of Economics and the John E. Jeuck Faculty Fellow at Chicago Booth, to explore Hurst's perspective on the possible common ground between macro- and micro- economic perspectives and to evaluate labor market trends from the early 2000s leading up to today on the employee side of the manufacturing and housing industries.