The Pie: An Economics Podcast

A company’s value includes not just the goods and services it provides but also the societal costs it imposes. In this episode of The Pie, Lubos Pastor, Charles P. McQuaid Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth, explores how to integrate the costs of corporate greenhouse gas emissions into traditional measures of corporate performance.

When some US states allowed nurse practitioners to prescribe controlled substances without physician oversight, a serious unintended consequence took hold: Doctors found themselves competing with those nurses for patients. Molly Schnell, BFI Saieh Family Fellow and assistant professor at Northwestern University, along with her colleagues—Janet Currie of Princeton and Anran Li of Cornell—examine the resultant uptick in prescriptions in controlled substances, and the impact on patients.

James Robinson, a University Professor with appointments in both UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy as well as the Political Science Department in the Division of Social Sciences, is the university’s latest faculty member to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. On this episode of “An Extra Slice of The Pie,” Robinson joins Ben Krause, BFI Executive Director and new, semi-regular guest host, to discuss his research and the path to a Nobel. Tune in to learn more about Robinson’s early challenges as a young researcher, his major breakthroughs, and his ideas for future work.

Bats are considered a natural pesticide. When they began to die out due to an invasive fungus, farmers turned to chemicals to control pests. The result, as Eyal Frank of the Harris school of Public Policy describes on this episode of The Pie, was skyrocketing infant deaths. Tune in to learn more about the vast ramifications of ecosystem disruptions.