Two Think Minimum

Professor Edward Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics and Faculty Director of the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley. We will be talking about his book, Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research, written with Garrett Christenson and Jeremy Freese. This podcast is part of our series on evidence-based policy.

Roger Noll is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economics & Policy Research. Prior to coming to Stanford, he has been a Senior Economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisors, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Institute Professor of Social Science and Chair of the Division of Humanities and Social Science at the California Institute of Technology. He's been a member of the advisory boards of the Department of Energy, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, the National Renewable Energy Labs, and the National Science Foundation. He holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University, a BS in Mathematics from Cal Tech, and he is the author or co-author of 15 books and over 300 articles on many subjects of particular interest for today's discussion. For much of his career, he's been involved in antitrust and the economics of sports, separately and their intersection. And then about 25 years ago, he went and forever stained his record by being my PhD advisor and inflicting me on the policy and economics world.

Michael is Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business & Department of Economics, where he was the Sarin Chair in Strategy and Leadership of the Institute for Business Innovation. He has also served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis in the Antitrust Division of the US Justice Department from September 2001 through January 2003. He was the Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission from January 1994 through January 1996. He's published extensively on the economics of network industries, intellectual property, telecommunications policy, and antitrust enforcement.

Adam Gamoran is president of the William T. Grant Foundation. Before that he was a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Disclaimer: TPI received a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation that allowed us to explore ways in which the 2019 Evidence Act could be administered more effectively.

Today, we're delighted to have as our guest, Michael McConnell. If you've been following the news at all lately, you probably know Michael is co-chair of the Facebook Oversight Board, which last week published its decision in the case involving President Trump's access to Facebook following the January 6th riot at the Capitol. Michael is also the Richard and Francis Mallory Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at the Stanford Law School and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. Michael has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law theory, has argued 15 cases in the US Supreme Court and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and DC Circuit Court Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been in an Assistant General Counsel of the OMD, where I had the pleasure of working with him on regulatory reform issues, and a member of the president's Intelligence Oversight Board.

Shane Greenstein is the Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration and Co-Chair of the HBS Digital Initiative. He also co-directs the Program on the Economics of Digitization at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and because HBS provides such modest bios, we thought we would embellish it a little bit with just some numbers from his CV. Shane has written nine books and edited volumes. 71 articles in peer review journals, 47 chapters in books, 15 published proceedings and reports, 52 invited publications, 150 articles for IEEE, which means that we could probably calculate the opportunity cost of your being with us today in terms of lost articles.

It's been a big year for antitrust with possible major implications for the future structure of the economy. There's no sign that this action will slow anytime soon. Given all that, we're delighted to have crack Politico antitrust reporter and Leah Nylen with us today to hash it all out. Leah has recently finished her first year at Politico after eight years before that at MLex, and she's also worked for Bloomberg and Congressional Quarterly.

Jon Baron. Jon is Vice-President of Evidence-Based Policy at Arnold Ventures. Before that, he founded the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, which worked with federal policy officials to advance evidence-based reform, and I feel particularly honored to have Jon here because he's on the front lines of the evidence-based policy initiative

Dr. Mary Shirley is President of the Ronald Coase Institute, a nonprofit organization working to improve knowledge of institutions and to build the capacity of young scholars to analyze and overcome institutional problems in their own countries. Mary has a PhD in economics and has worked for over 30 years in development, including over 20 years as a research manager in the World Bank. She's author of numerous scholarly articles and books on institutional issues and economic development. She's also written on reform of state owned enterprises, including telecom, water, and more.

On our first completely internal podcast! Today, we're just going to take stock of the tech policy landscape. We'll talk mostly about the $1.9 trillion stimulus and a little bit of antitrust, and we'll figure out what we know and don't know. Hopefully, we'll have more of the know than don't know, but I don't know what the over-under is on those odds.