The Pie: An Economics Podcast

Since 2023, 25 states have passed laws requiring adult websites to verify visitors' ages. Meanwhile, total time spent on these sites has fallen by only about 10%. In this episode, UChicago economist Matthew Brown discusses new research that uses browsing data to trace where that traffic went, with implications for with implications for how policymakers regulate the internet more broadly.

Roughly 3 million Americans own private businesses and have a net worth of at least $5 million. Together they hold more than $50 trillion, about 13 times the wealth of the entire Forbes 400. In this episode, Chicago Booth economist Eric Zwick discusses The Everywhere Millionaire, his new book with Owen Zidar, which draws on a decade of tax data to characterize this class of car dealers, dentists, and beer distributors in towns across the country.

By 2024, inflation was falling and unemployment was low, yet consumer confidence had sunk to levels last seen during the Great Recession. In this episode, Erik Hurst of Chicago Booth and his co-author Christina Patterson draw on payroll records for roughly 16 million workers to show how wages fell behind prices during the recent inflationary period and haven't caught back up.

Last December, Australia banned social media for anyone under 16. Four months later, only one in four 14- and 15-year-olds were complying, a share that has since fallen further. In this episode of The Pie, Leonardo Bursztyn, the Saieh Family Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and co-director of BFI's Political Economics Initiative, discusses why the ban hasn't worked, and what a successful one might entail.

US sanctions on Russian banks have complex spillovers for the importers and exporters who transact in dollars. On this episode of The Pie, Brent Neiman, the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, returns to discuss recent research tracing how those sanctions ripple through the global payments network, and whether they are pushing heavily sanctioned economies away from the dollar and toward China's yuan.

When a police officer is shot, is it safer to wait for an ambulance or to be driven straight to the hospital in a squad car? In this episode of The Pie, Prachi Sanghavi, an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Health Policy Data Lab, discusses new research tracing how shooting victims across 18 U.S. cities reach the hospital, and what it reveals about a decades-old debate over pre-hospital care.

New research shows that people are strikingly bad at predicting how good it feels to connect with a stranger. In this episode of The Pie, Nick Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and author of A Little More Social, discusses what more than 120 experiments reveal about why we avoid reaching out to others, and what that avoidance may be costing us.

In the United States, regulators inspect nursing homes to ensure compliance with quality, safety, and other standards. While these inspections are not technically announced, they are easy for nursing home staff to predict because they usually occur annually. In this episode of The Pie, Maggie Shi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, discusses how this predictability affects nursing homes' effort levels, and, in turn, resident health.

At a time when forty percent of American two-year-olds have their own tablet, a new generation of AI toys and chatbots is being marketed as a better alternative to screens. On this episode, Dana Suskind, pediatric cochlear implant surgeon, co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health, and author of the new book Human Raised, explains the importance of human interaction for children's brain development.

Voters consistently say they care most about the economy — jobs, wages, inflation, the price of gas. So why are campaigns so often fought over culture? In this episode, Konstantin Sonin, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and co-director of BFI's Political Economics Initiative, walks host Tess Vigeland through his theory of "multi-dimensional signaling." Because economic policy is too complex for voters to fully decode, they read a candidate's cultural stances as a proxy for what that candidate will do economically, and politicians exploit it.

When a child brings home good grades but low standardized test scores, which signal should parents pay attention to? In this episode, Ariel Kalil of the UChicago Harris School of Public Policy discusses new research showing that parents lean heavily on grades, and high grades often crowd out the extra help low test scores would otherwise prompt. With pandemic learning losses disguised by inflated grades, Kalil discusses how this dynamic may mean that struggling kids aren't getting the support they need.

When immigrant workers come to a country on a visa tied to a single employer, what is it worth to be free to switch jobs? In this episode, Chicago Booth economist Matt Notowidigdo discusses new research using Canadian administrative data to track temporary foreign workers when they gain permanent residency. Job-switching rates jump 21.7 percentage points and earnings rise 5.7 percent within three years, driven largely by workers sorting into higher-paying firms across industries.

Have you taken a Lyft, shopped at Walmart, or used Facebook in the last decade? If so, you've likely been a participant in one of John List's experiments. In this episode of The Pie, List, Professor of Economics and Director of the Becker Friedman Institute, returns to discuss his new 900-page textbook, Experimental Economics: Theory in Practice — the field guide he wishes he'd had as he pioneered the use of real-world experiments to figure out what moves human behavior across policy and business. From a Wisconsin baseball-card table in 1985 to the White House, Lyft, and Walmart, List shares the lessons, mistakes, and ethical questions that have shaped three decades of discovery.

Earlier this year, former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that political pressure on the Federal Reserve could turn the U.S. into "a banana republic." And yet long-term interest rates, inflation expectations, and the dollar have shown a remarkably muted reaction to President Trump's public pressure on Chair Jerome Powell. Why? In this episode of The Pie, Randall Kroszner, Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth and a former Federal Reserve Governor during the 2008 financial crisis, argues that markets are staying calm because they trust the institutional guardrails around the Fed, which include the courts, the Senate, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Recorded live at UChicago as part of BFI's Wealth 250 campaign marking the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Kroszner walks through the market data and draws on his time inside the Fed during the global financial crisis to explain the difference between independence and accountability.

In this Extra Slice of The Pie, guest host Ben Krause sits down with Raghuram Rajan, Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth, for a wide-ranging conversation on everything from what 25,000 CEO letters reveal about corporate America's shift from maximizing shareholder value to prioritizing customers and employees, to why communities matter as much as markets and the state, the political equilibrium that determines whether societies thrive or collapse, how inequality drove the 2008 financial crisis, and why AI could create catastrophic outcomes without better support for workers. Rajan reflects on his path from observing development gaps as a child to prescient warnings about financial crises, explains why modern firms are fundamentally about managing power struggles between stakeholders, and makes the case for "inclusive localism," or, empowering communities while keeping borders open to competition.

When public school districts offer options like magnet schools and dual-language programs, families who are richer, whiter, and higher-achieving are more likely to opt in. Meanwhile, students who would benefit most are least likely to apply. In this episode, Chicago Booth economist Chris Campos explains why the participation architecture of school choice matters as much as the quality of the schools themselves, and why information campaigns alone aren't enough to close the gap.

On February 28, the US and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran. Four weeks later, the conflict shows no signs of ending. Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz, taking roughly 10% of global oil supply off the market. Energy prices have spiked to levels not seen since the 1970s, and Iran continues to strike US allies using drones, cyber attacks, and other tactics. In this panel recorded at the Harris School of Public Policy, three University of Chicago experts, Ryan Kellogg on energy markets, Paul Poast on military alliances, and Jake Braun on cyber policy, discuss why the US struck now, why European allies have been reluctant to join, and why there's no clear exit from the conflict.

For more on the event:

https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/operation-epic-fury-and-problem-undefined-war

People in the Netherlands average nearly 11 years of schooling, compared to about 2.5 for those in the Central African Republic. Why don't these gaps close? In this episode, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg of the University of Chicago explains recent research that divides the entire globe into more than 16,000 grid cells to study the costs of acquiring human capital, and how these valuable skills drive economic development.

If you have money in an index fund, you are benefiting from Eugene Fama's work. In this Extra Slice of The Pie, the Nobel laureate and "father of modern finance" reflects on a career that reshaped how trillions of dollars are invested, including his development of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which provides the theoretical foundation for passive investing.

Two hundred fifty years after The Wealth of Nations, capitalism looks nothing like Adam Smith imagined (and nothing like Karl Marx predicted, either). Smith envisioned small, decentralized producers, while Marx foresaw concentration dominated by the rich. In this lecture, Yueran Ma of Chicago Booth draws on centuries of global data to show how production concentrated while ownership diffused, and the giants at the top keep getting toppled.