S3E23: Adriana Lleras-Muney, Labor Economist, UCLA

The Mixtape with Scott

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Mixtape with Scott! Today, I get to have on the show someone who has become something of a friend the last few years, an expert in health economics and social policy, Adriana Lleras-Muney at UCLA, a Professor of Economics at UCLA.

Dr. Lleras-Muney's journey in economics is super impressive and even involves traveling through all the alleyways of causal inference. After earning her Ph.D. from Columbia University where she wrote a job market paper on compulsory schooling, at a time where it had just become accepted wisdom that the Angrist and Krueger 1991 article needed a fresh take. She then went to Princeton, the birth place of causal inference in labor, before making her way to UCLA where Guido Imbens had just gotten to, and who is also now one of her coauthors in a new article at the Quarterly Journal of Economics. So when I think about her story, it’s hard for me not to hear the echoes, I guess, of the history of causal inference too.

Her academic accolades are too many to name, but I’ll name a few. She's an associate editor for the Journal of Health Economics and serves on the board of editors for both the American Economic Review and Demography. She’s also been a permanent member of the Social Sciences and Population Studies Study Section at the National Institute of Health and an elected member of the American Economic Association Executive committee. In 2017, her contributions to the field were recognized with the prestigious Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

But what really sets Adriana apart is her groundbreaking research. She's been at the forefront of exploring the relationships between socioeconomic status and health, with a particular focus on education, income, and policy. Her recent work has taken a fascinating turn, examining the long-term impact of government policies on children. She's been digging into programs like the Mother's Pension program and the Civilian Conservation Corps from the first half of the 20th century, uncovering insights that are still relevant today. Her work has appeared in all the major journals in economics such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, The Review of Economic Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

So, all that said, I hope you find this interview as interesting as I did. The video will be posted most likely later to YouTube; my Scottish hotel has surprisingly very slow internet and I’m still downloading the video, and so will likely be uploading it too all night. But thank you again for all your support.

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