#AcademicRunPlaylist - 2/29/24

It was an extremely eventful day (more soon!), but I was still able to fit in some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Peter Buckley on the current questions and grand challenges around large multinational businesses at the Alliance Manchester Business School https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ7XpArRel0

Next was a comprehensive talk by Rachel Heath on women's labor force participation at VoxDev. Heath reviews a host of studies on barriers to women's labor supply and participation and the efficacy of different policies to increase women's labor supply https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O4Ytp1xVuM

Next was an engaging discussion with John Coates on the issues with financial institution concentration at the Stigler Center. There's some spicy discussion of the role of private equity firms in this environment, and the challenges of reforming shareholder voting under the current state of affairs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GiqXW1RfNI

Next was a fantastic conversation with Martin Sybblis on decolonization and corporate law on the Business Scholarship Podcast. This is a fascinating examination of the differential economic and social outcomes of different Caribbean countries and the role that corporate law (particularly tax law) played and continues to play in the decolonization process. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAA04LmiZGI

Next was an excellent talk by Konrad Kording on causal inference in the real world at the Allen Institute for AI. Kording examines how causality and correlation work, then discusses mechanisms that people use to figure out causality. Finally, he highlights how causal inference can be viewed as a meta-learning problem. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOgsJKkmRJc

Next was an intriguing talk by David Holtz on the impact of generative AI on entrepreneurial performance at the National Bureau of Economic Research. This paper has been making the rounds, and while the headline is that generative AI doesn't have any impact, there are some slices of the data that indicate differential effects (although I'm a bit skeptical) https://www.youtube.com/live/nnlP_mnK2-s?si=Yic8ocQTAGHmRYnk&t=2777

Last was an interesting talk by Nicole Creanza on cultural evolution in structured populations at the Santa Fe Institute. This is sort of a grand unified model of cultural evolution, combining genetics, geography, and linguistic data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpRZzmvHivg