UChicago Economics Events and Conversations

This Becker Friedman Institute feed carries The Pie, a University of Chicago production hosted and executive produced by Tess Vigeland. The name comes from a stock image in economics: a pie that grows and shrinks, gets sliced, and leaves someone with the biggest piece. The stated aim is to look at the pressing issues of the day through that lens. In practice, a single study sits at the center of each conversation, and a researcher explains what the data turned up. Findings come first. The pandemic comes up from more than one side. In 'Lessons from Pandemic Unemployment Benefits: When Government Generosity Becomes Necessity', a guest explains how expanded jobless benefits, together with mortgage-pause policies, broke the long-standing link between losing a job and falling behind on a mortgage. 'Social Distancing in 2023: The Economic Costs of Lingering COVID Fears' focuses on the minority who kept distancing after mandates ended, with women and Democratic-leaning workers somewhat more likely to stay away from work. Labor markets take a counterintuitive turn in 'The Hidden Economic Forces That Determine How Much You Earn', where the finding is that physicians can earn substantially more by moving away from the coasts. Medicare payment policy and thinner local competition are part of the explanation offered. Education comes in through Los Angeles. There, zones of choice let families apply to any school in their zone instead of a single neighborhood school, and because the policy covers only part of the district, it works as a natural experiment. Money and markets round out the range. In 'Do You Even Crypto, Bro?', a guest describes crypto holders as mostly young, higher-income men and notes that about a fifth of them keep half or more of their savings in it. 'Harvesting Green Investments: The Promise and Perils of ESG' compares green and brown stocks, including evidence that green shares outperform on days when newspaper coverage of climate risk spikes. Vigeland's job in all this is translation. She asks the basic question outright, like what a climate shock is or where a Medicare subsidy comes from. Then she pushes guests toward the results and out to the wider economy: what recipients did with their money, what a pattern means for the labor force. Guests work to anchor their own numbers too. One stops to admit that an achievement gap measured in standard deviations is hard to translate, then calls it sizable. The titles have a light touch, with a meme-style question about crypto next to an earnest question mark about school choice. What a listener comes away with is one piece of research, stated with its numbers and questioned until it holds together.