About this episode

This episode features a rerun of an interview with economist Ariel Pakes discussing his contributions to economics and personal experiences.

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…

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