The Pie: An Economics Podcast

Financial crises are "everywhere and always" a problem of short-term debt. In this Extra Slice of The Pie, Nobel laureate Douglas Diamond explains his groundbreaking research on why banks exist in the first place, and why they're vulnerable to runs. Diamond discusses his role advising policymakers during the 2008 crisis, reflects on predicting the savings and loan disaster as a graduate student in the 1970s, and explains why the 30-year mortgage is like Michael Corleone: something good that went bad when it hung around with the wrong crowd.

Standard measures of intergenerational mobility treat parental income as a single average across childhood. In this episode, Steven Durlauf, Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility, describes how parental income during the tween and adolescent years (ages 12-18) is far more predictive of adult outcomes than parental income during early childhood.

As we close out 2025, host Tess Vigeland highlights research from UChicago scholars. Hyuk Su Kwon, Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, explains the design of electric vehicle subsidies. Eduardo Montero, Assistant Professor at Harris, reveals how Seventh Day Adventist churches adapt when members face costly trade-offs between faith and farming. Virginia Minni, Assistant Professor at the Booth School of Business, shares how a one-day purpose workshop where workers connect childhood passions to their current roles drives measurable productivity gains. Plus, Leo Bursztyn discusses why green text bubbles create lock-in effects for Apple. Full versions of these conversations are available wherever you get your podcasts.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Nobel Prize–winning economist Roger Myerson reflects on a career studying how rules shape human behavior, from optimal auction design to Ukraine's decentralization reforms. Myerson explains the foundations of mechanism design and incentive constraints, tracing economics back to Xenophon and arguing that local democracy is what holds democracies together.

Large gaps in language skills between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds emerge early and persist throughout schooling. In this episode, Ariel Kalil, Professor of Public Policy at UChicago's Harris School, discusses her research on "Chat2Learn," a technology intervention that sends open-ended conversation prompts to parents' phones. The low-cost behavioral nudge increases vocabulary, encourages back-and-forth conversation, and fosters curiosity in young children.