Economics Amplified

In this episode, Murphy and James Heckman, Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, delve into the topic of human capital, focusing on how both education and early home life play a defining role in the development of a child, and talk about how the economics toolkit is influencing the work of social scientists outside the discipline.

In this episode, Murphy talks with Steven Davis, William H. Abbott Professor of International Business and Economics at Chicago Booth, explore labor market trends from the employer side and talk about how uncertainty over impending government policy and regulatory shifts can influence labor market trends and job creation.

In this episode, Murphy talks with Benjamin Brooks, a Becker Friedman Institute Research Fellow, about what drew Brooks to economics as his field of research, the nuances of understanding game theory, and the role of the Becker Friedman Institute in enriching the study of economics at the University of Chicago.

In this episode, we speak with Manasi Deshpande, who currently works at the Institute as a postdoctoral research fellow leading up to joining the UChicago Economics Department as an assistant professor in the fall of 2016. Deshpande’s research interests include the effects of social insurance and public assistance programs on consumption, health, and well being, and the interaction between these programs and labor markets. By taking advantage of newly available data from the Social Security Administration, she's able to gather quantitative insights into the impact that social insurance programs have on long-term outcomes of their recipients, important when weighing their overall benefits and costs.

In today’s episode we talk with Ben Brooks, a research fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute interested in how incomplete information complicates classical game theory. This summer, Brooks organized a conference, bringing together experts in mathematical modeling, incomplete information and game theory. Researchers highlighted important developments in modeling information in auctions and continuous games, as well as the relationship between information and behavior in the era of the internet and big data.

In this episode, we speak with David Weisbach and Jennifer Nou of the University of Chicago Law School, as well as Alan Sanstad of the Computation Institute and The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. The trio of researchers organized a conference in April 2015 centered on a persistent issues for federal institutions: when making regulations and rules, how should policymakers account for what they don’t know: the uncertainties that could affect the long term costs and benefits of their actions? Weisbach, Nou and Sanstad sat down with us to talk about why getting policymakers and economic theorists together might hold the key to helping federal agencies best assess these uncertainties and understand how to address them in the policy process.

John Taylor and Harald Uhlig recount a recent series of conference aimed at codifying the most important principles guiding modern macroeconomic analysis. Music is by Boris Mann 2, whom you can listen to on Soundcloud. Licensed under Creative Commons.