Dialogo | UChicago Social Sciences

Hi, and welcome to Dialogo, a podcast of the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, where we speak with our alumni about both their time in the PhD or MA program and their careers since then. I am Kelly Therese Pollock, the Dean of Students of the Division of Social Sciences.

And I am Paul Poast, Deputy Dean in Social Science Division here at the University of Chicago.

And today we are delighted to be joined by Jeanne-Mey Sun, a 1999 PhD recipient of economics in the Division of the Social Sciences. And she is currently the founder and principal of JTNL Advisory. Welcome, Jeanne-Mey.

Thank you, Kelly. Thank you, Paul. It's great to be here and I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

Yes. So I'd like to start by asking a little bit about what your current career is, the kinds of things you do, what a founder and principal might be.

Sure. Well, thank you again. After leaving the corporate world a couple of years ago, I decided to start my own independent advisory and consulting firm called JTNL Advisory LLC. And I’ve focused on a portfolio of activities, which includes consulting, advisory work, engaging in various working groups, student mentoring, some lecturing, and some engagement in the startup ecosystem. Most of my work has been focused at the intersection of energy and environmental sustainability, particularly climate, but I've also worked on broader strategic engagements in other areas like healthcare and regional economic development.

Some examples of activities include: on the consulting side, I provide insights on independent power generator business models to investors considering entry to the sector. This is, of course, of particular interest given the expected rapid growth of electricity demand driven by AI and electrification in the economy.

Another example is I advised a waste management firm on its inaugural impact and sustainability report. On the advisory side, I serve on the advisory board of the Greater Houston Partnership's Houston Energy Transition Initiative. For context, the Greater Houston Partnership is Houston's Chamber of Commerce and the Houston Energy Transition Initiative is advancing Houston's aspiration to be the energy transition capital of the world, so not just the oil and gas capital of the world or the energy capital of the world, but really a place where all forms of energy can have a place and where we produce more energy with less emissions. And our current focus areas include electricity, carbon management, and technology commercialization in the energy space.

A related activity is [with] an organization called OpenMinds, which is a nonprofit focused on the dual challenge of producing more energy with less emissions. Our current flagship project is what we've called Grid Vision, which is a plan to both optimize the current US electricity grid and build new grid to accommodate electricity demand growth.

From a working group standpoint, I've served on a couple of different working groups on impact measurement and management convened by the Prime Coalition and that group has developed methodologies for impact investors to calculate the avoided greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate solutions. It sounds pretty technical and it is, but it's a wonderful group of people from around the world that are all focused on measuring effects in the climate space.

And we just kicked off another working group, which is looking at the social and environmental impacts of climate adaptation and resilience solutions, with the idea being that there are some startups in that space and investors want to understand the impact of the solutions that they're offering. And so we're going to be digging into the methodology around climate adaptation and resilience, whereas the earlier work was focused on climate mitigation.

On a separate front, which is completely different from the energy space, last year I served on a working group for the Center for Houston's Future developing what we call Vision 2050 for Houston, which is a blueprint for Houston's next 25 years covering its economy and workforce, infrastructure and mobility, environment and resilience, education, and quality of life and community. And currently with that same organization, I'm serving on a working group on the Brain Economy, which is a strategy to extend Houston's success as the world's largest medical center with renowned capabilities in cancer care among other specialties by developing similar capabilities in lifelong brain health, which in turn will improve human health and economic growth and development. And my focus with that work has been on measuring both brain health and brain skills. It's also been on healthy aging strategies and we're going to be beginning work on healthcare systems change as well as innovation in the health technology space.

From a mentoring standpoint, I've mentored graduate students on projects related to the dual challenge, so again, producing more energy with less emissions. Example projects have included framing and measuring progress on the dual challenge globally, as well as quantifying the economic costs of climate change across various scenarios over time and then translating those findings into communications for stakeholders in industry and government and recommending policy interventions.

From a lecturing standpoint, I've given a couple of lectures, again on pretty technical topics. So one around the lifecycle assessment of electricity generation and storage technology emissions. So the idea that you can't just look at a certain part of the value chain, you need to look across the value chain from so called cradle to grave. And I gave another lecture on industrial organization and the energy sector, and in particular, the challenges of integrating lower carbon intensity energy technologies into electricity systems and the roles that regulation and pricing can play in that integration. And then lastly, I've been engaged in the startup ecosystem. So every year I judge an annual business plan competition hosted by Rice University here in Houston and I've also mentored founders of various clean energy startups.

Wow. No, I mean that seriously. Wow. And especially because when one takes a moment to think about the biggest challenges facing society, facing the economy, I mean, if you will, facing humanity, I mean energy, electricity, aging, these are core areas and the fact that you're able to work in those areas is really fantastic. And especially as you said, you're doing this through your own firm, through your own consultancy. And that's actually kind of leads me a little bit to the next question, which is obviously you have a background that led you into this and you alluded to that a little bit when you said, “I left corporate to come here and start my own consultancy”. So I'd love to be able to hear a little bit about your career track that led up to this point where you during that career that led you to develop this expertise, especially as it pertains to energy and the environment.

Sure, sure. So I guess I'll go back to the job market when I was finishing my PhD and so that would've been the fall of '98 and then '99. And so I went on both the academic and the non-academic job markets, which for economists is very common, or at least at the time was common, and I think it is still. And I ultimately had offers in both the academic and the non-academic markets, although I actually had many more opportunities in the private sector. And as one would expect from an economist, one of my professors said, "Jeanne-Mey, you should listen to what the market is telling you," which it was actually a very interesting comment at the time. And so I decided to enter the private sector and I joined the global management consulting firm, Kearney, which is headquartered in Chicago.

And I've reflected on this decision and obviously I'll never know what would've happened if I had remained in academia, but to this day, I believe that actually leaving academia was one of the best career decisions that I made for myself. In consulting, I really enjoyed the camaraderie with my colleagues around the world, the continuous learning, the fast pace and the sheer variety of the work. So to give you an example, my typical project was two to three months long, 8 to 12 weeks, which was very different than the three years I had just spent on my dissertation. And unlike a lot of the idealized economic models I had studied in the PhD program, in my consulting work, I was confronted with a high degree of imperfect information to put it in economics terms.

Shortly after graduation, I remember comparing notes with a classmate who had taken an academic role and he asked me what I was doing at work and I explained that I had just spent three months trying to gather the internal data from a client needed to estimate just one point on that client's supply curve. And so that was very different than the starting assumption of we have perfect information, we know the supply curve, the demand curve under different conditions and so on and so forth. And it just gives a sense of how different it was from the PhD program, but I really enjoyed it.

At first I was part of the firm's, meaning Kearney's, economic consulting practice where I focused on issues like intellectual property and international transfer pricing. I subsequently joined the firm's management consulting practice and I had the opportunity to serve clients in a wide variety of industries as well as on a wide variety of functional areas. So from an industry standpoint, I served clients in consumer products, retail, automotive, utilities and power generation, IT, telecommunications, industrial products, and pharmaceuticals. So it's a very broad remit. And then from a functional standpoint, I did corporate and business unit strategy and planning, sales and marketing strategy, corporate development, consumer insights, performance management and operational topics like procurement, cost to serve, and complexity management. And while I was at Kearney, I also co-authored a book on pricing optimization with one of my colleagues, which became the basis for the firm's work in that area in pricing optimization, which is a fascinating area that continues to be important today.

And I could have stayed in consulting for the rest of my career, but we worked at the client's location, which often meant that I was away from home five days a week. And so when my husband and I started a family, I knew I needed to find a role that didn't require as much travel, which effectively was every week at the time. I was really fortunate to be recruited by Sysco Corporation in Houston, so I moved ... Well, I was in Chicago and then we moved to Houston and I was recruited by Sysco to build and lead their enterprise strategy, innovation, and market analytics functions and that was on the back of a lot of the work that I did or had done in the consumer product space, particularly focused on food.

For context, Sysco is an $81 billion food service marketer, distributor, and supply chain company. And if you think about the food that you consume, you can separate it into the food you buy at the grocery store and consume at home versus the food you eat away from home in places like restaurants and hotels and so on. And Sysco serves that second, food away from home market. They had been very successful as a company growing as women entered the labor market in the 1970s and they had less time to cook and families therefore increasingly ate out. But by the late 2000s, growth in that food away from home market was plateauing and Sysco wanted to figure out how to respond. And so my team and I developed the first enterprise strategic plan as well as plans for each of the company's market areas, the vision, mission, and strategy. And we also identified both new growth areas and opportunities to reduce operating and product expenses. And that was a fantastic experience and a great way to transition from the consulting side to the corporate side.

I stayed there for about five years and after that, I realized that if I wanted to remain in Houston, I would eventually need to join the energy industry because that's what is a big part of the Houston economy. And I ultimately joined Baker Hughes, which is a $28 billion energy technology company. For context, within the energy value chain, Baker Hughes is a supplier of both products and services to energy companies like oil and gas producers as well as electric power generators.

And I had a number of roles at the company including building and leading their business consulting practice, which serves oil and gas operators globally, leading corporate strategy, and leading the integration of the Baker Hughes-GE oil and gas merger from a strategic standpoint.

And then in my last role at Baker Hughes on the back of that strategy experience, I was asked to lead the development of the company's energy transition strategy. In other words, how the company should respond to macro trends suggesting that fossil fuels would increasingly compete against and could be displaced by lower carbon intensity energies like solar and wind.

And so in that context, my team and I wrote the company's Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Commitment, which was an oil and gas industry first. And we launched that commitment internally and externally to customers, suppliers, buy side investors and sell side analysts. And in particular, we built a portfolio of solutions that would help our customers both reduce their carbon footprints and save them money at the same time and we worked with them on joint carbon reduction footprint efforts. We also identified potential investments in clean energy solutions that we could use to reduce our own carbon footprint as a company.

And then from there, I was hired by NRG Energy, which was my most recent corporate role and NRG Energy is a $31 billion integrated electricity producer, natural gas marketer, and energy services retailer, and I was Chief Sustainability Officer. And so my team and I led the company's sustainability strategy and program, which included evaluating ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the company, from suppliers, and also on behalf of customers. These strategies included things like lower emission power generation, so coupling renewables and storage, converting power generation from coal- to natural gas-fired generation, blending natural gas with hydrogen, carbon capture utilization and sequestration.

We also looked at electrification in the form of electric vehicles and heat pumps, lower carbon footprint natural gas, and carbon offsets. And we did a lot of measurement work, which I mentioned earlier is still part of what I do because you can't manage what you don't measure and we developed the company's first emissions inventory across its full value chain, which included things like quantifying the reduced and avoided emissions associated with lower carbon products and services that we provided to our customers. So things like renewable electricity plans, rooftop solar, and demand response. And our customers really wanted to understand if they were buying these products, not only what it would cost them, but what the impact would be on their own carbon footprint. So that was a very important part of the work that we did.

And then we oversaw reporting on environmental, social and governance or so called ESG topics and led the company's engagement with a diverse set of stakeholders, including investors, ESG rating firms, sustainability standards bodies, industry and academic groups and we developed the company's position on proposed sustainability regulation, legislation, and voluntary standards. And we built and led partnerships with the climate tech ecosystem, which also is something that I continue to be engaged with today.

So I guess in a nutshell, I mean a long journey, but actually as I look back on it, it all relates in some way. And I think each role actually was a very good foundation for the work that I've done since then.

Yeah. It's fascinating hearing all the pieces of those different roles that are obviously playing into what you currently do. I want to go back a little bit further in time and understand how you ended up at the University of Chicago in the first place. I think your undergrad was in Canada, your master's degree was in Europe, so how did you then end up in the doctoral program at the University of Chicago?

Well, yeah, and I had to remind myself of that journey as well. So as you mentioned, I studied at the University of Toronto. So I'm Canadian, I grew up in a suburb of Toronto and I studied economics and international relations for my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. I then did a master's degree in European economics at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. And after getting my master's, I ended up working in Brussels, Belgium at a policy think tank called the Centre for European Policy Studies. And my focus there was on the economics of the European Union's internal market, which was its effort at the time to have free movement in goods, services, labor, and capital.

My focus there, as I said, was on that internal market and I became very interested in the role that regulation could play in both advancing as well as limiting economic integration among the member states. An analog to the European Union is when you think about the United States, we have individual states and there are certain activities that are governed at the federal level and there's free movement across the states and then there's others that are not. And also in Canada with the provinces, there's a similar way to think about that. And I ultimately knew that I wanted to do a PhD in economics so that I could compliment the policy orientation that I had really developed until that point.

And so in the fall of 1992 while working in Brussels, I remember picking up the Financial Times newspaper one day and reading that Gary Becker had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. And the more I read about his work and learned about the Chicago School of Economics, the more I set my sights on doing my PhD at Chicago. And I learned that Chicago was an intellectual leader in the economics of regulation, not only due to the work of Gary Becker, but due to George Stigler's work and Sam Peltzman's work. And this dovetailed very closely with my work and my interests at the time and so I became very focused on coming to Chicago.

Well, now that you're at Chicago, talk a little bit about the experience you had there. And I think a good place to start with that is maybe more at the end, which is what did you do for your dissertation?

Sure. And I have to say, I went back and reviewed it since obviously I have not been in academia since Chicago. But yeah, before coming to Chicago, as I mentioned, I was very interested in regulation, but more generally in empirical microeconomics and political economy. And my fields in the PhD program were industrial organization, public finance, and labor economics. And I wanted my dissertation to draw on those fields as well as my prior interests.

And so what I ended up doing was a dissertation called “Interjurisdictional Competition with an Application to International Equity Markets” and I know that's a long title, but what it was is basically looking at the extent to which governments competed with one another on the basis of a particular tax, in this case, the Securities Transaction Tax. This was an ad valorem tax that was levied on the value of equity trades in major developed financial markets. So think like a tax on stock exchange transactions.

And my work was empirical. I gathered a panel data set on 16 countries over 19 years and I found that countries matched each other's tax changes one for one over time. So in particular, as global capital markets became more open, the tax was effectively competed down to zero. And in addition to the trajectory of the tax over time, I also analyzed the relationship between a country's tax and the political importance of its financial sector, the share of government expenditures in the economy, and the prevalence of firms cross-listing their stocks on other countries’ stock exchanges. And at the time that I wrote that dissertation in the mid to late '90s, there was a lot of discussion about globalization and the prospect that a country's ability to tax and regulate in ways that differ appreciably from its neighbors, that that ability to tax and regulate was diminishing over time given the increasing global mobility of goods, services, capital, and labor.

And among some, there was concern that there would be a so called race to the bottom in taxation and regulation. And it turned out to be true in this particular case, but of course this was a very particular case with a very particular tax in a very global setting, meaning the financial markets. And it's interesting to see that discussions about globalization continue today 30 years later. So the topic of this interjurisdictional competition or competition among governments has proven to be evergreen and it's been interesting to see that continue, including calls to resurrect this type of tax, which come up every once in a while. Every couple years I'll see an article about it, but to my knowledge, it has actually not been [re-]implemented anywhere.

It's fascinating to hear that because just a year or so after you would've earned your PhD, I was working on my master's degree at the London School of Economics and it was in international political economy. And so everything you were talking about in terms of globalization, leading to competition that would drive this race to the bottom and the concerns about it was a big theme of that. So completely understand why that would've been such a central dissertation topic at that time. Now another key question is, was your dissertation a three paper dissertation of the standard econ type or was it more of a comprehensive treatment of the topic?

So that was one of the things I wanted to remind myself. So it was not a three paper approach. Actually, that approach of writing more than one paper really didn't come up until after I graduated. So at the time, most people wrote just one paper and I looked and my dissertation was 44 pages. It was very short, very to the point. Of course, it had a lot of pages of tables and appendices of proofs and so on, but the actual meat of it was very short and yeah, it was not the three papers. I think that came later.

And I think even though the three papers came later, my understanding is as people joke, the three papers are your job market paper, a publishable paper, and then a third paper.

So at the time we had to do, and I think this might, or still is the case, you had to do a proposal or a thesis proposal, which was not really a proposal. It was effectively almost the completed product. And so I ended up doing that in the fall of '98, refined that based on feedback at the proposal, went on the job market with that same paper and then went ... Yeah, After that if I had stayed in academia, I think that would've been the publishable paper as well. So it was one, in my case, one paper and I think most of my classmates also only did one paper.

So I want to ask my favorite question, which I know is a fraught question for people who got their PhD at Chicago in the late '90s, especially women, but what sorts of things did you do for fun? Did you have fun while you were in the PhD program?

Yeah. Okay. As with most things, there is a short answer and a longer, more nuanced answer. So the short answer is that the PhD program in economics as I experienced it was pretty brutal and there wasn't enough time for sufficient sleep, much less for leisure. I mean, I don't think there's any way of saying that other than what I just said. And this was especially true during the first year of the program or the so called core, which was the most challenging year. So people studied every waking moment during the school year and while preparing for the core exams in the summer.

So for example, for my friends and me, our typical schedule while preparing for the summer core exams was to study at The Reg until it closed at 1:00 AM. I think it actually doesn't even close that late today, which is amazing. But anyway, we studied until it closed at 1:00 AM. Then we walked over to NORC and studied until 4:00 AM. And then we took the last white van shuttle service back to our dorm rooms in International House.

And I remember, I mean, we had a classmate who shaved his head during the core because he didn't want to waste any extra second washing his hair during that time. I mean, people went to extreme lengths to maximize literally every second they could to study for the core exams. Now, thankfully after that first year, things got better and we were able to choose the fields we wanted to do and then work on our dissertations. And so in those subsequent years, we still worked extremely hard, but we were able to go out a bit more. And a friend of mine had a car and a group of us would often go for dinner in Chinatown on Saturday evenings after The Reg closed, of course, not before.

And if we didn't have the time to leave Hyde Park or we didn't have access to a car, we might have dinner at Medici On 57th or watch the late showing of the movie playing at Doc Films in Ida Noyes. I had a lot of Latin American classmates and after big milestones like the end of exams or someone getting their dissertation proposal approved, we would go dancing at one of the salsa or merengue clubs downtown and that was a lot of fun.

But I want to point out we had a lot of good camaraderie within our class as well as with the class above and the class below. And that was probably because of the overall stress of the program, so we really bonded with each other. And I want to point out, I don't know if this still happens, but we had an annual econ department skit show and it was filled with a lot of inside jokes and material that really only economists and probably only Chicago economists would understand and appreciate. And it wasn't only students that participated, so faculty did as well and their performances were really good and really memorable.

So I remember a couple of econometrics professors writing and performing a rhyming rap about econometrics that would put Eminem to shame. I mean, really, I actually don't have a copy of that, I wish I did, and of course this was not videotaped at all, so it's just in our memories, but it was really a lot of fun or I guess fun for an economist, let's say. We also just talked a lot about economics. So not only about our coursework and dissertations, but economics in everyday life. So I still remember the cafe on the A level of The Reg would put out unsold perishable food like muffins and donuts five minutes or so before it closed every day. And at that point, anyone in the vicinity could take this food without paying for it.

And we talked extensively about how it would never make sense to purchase food near closing time when it would be available for free only a few minutes later. And we debated how much earlier before closing time it would make sense to purchase food versus wait. And we would lurk around the cafe waiting for the free food to be put out. I mean, this is all terrible behavior in a sense, but it also made a lot of sense. And I think we were as economists, the only ones who did this. We really didn't see other students doing this. So that probably says something about us or our cost of time or what have you.

And another example, which again, terrible to say, but what I would call optimal lateness, I don't know if this is a thing in economics. So when you meet with a group of people to go out, should you be on time or should you be late? And if so, how late should you be? And so there's a whole game theory around this.

And so when we would meet to go out on those rare occasions, no one showed up at the agreed time because they didn't want to be waiting around for others to show up and they knew that people would wait, but they didn't want to be the last person to show up because that would be annoying to everyone else. So it really became this sort of like, as I said, game theory of figuring out what's the optimal time to arrive. And I think after about our third year, we converged on a maximum of like 25 to 30 minutes of lateness, which is actually quite a lot. In the business world, that would be completely unacceptable. But in our student life, it turned out to be that way and I would show up about 15 to 20 minutes late. So comfortably ahead of the last person to arrive, but not really enough to waste 30 minutes waiting.

So I mean, those are some examples and there are definitely more. I mean just with my roommates living in Regents Park, we debated endlessly on neatness and whether neatness had to be done on a period by period budget constraint or whether we could smooth it out over time. And so anyway, these are examples of the types of discussions we had and probably a lot of people wouldn't find continuous discussions of economics fun, but we lived and breathed economics and this intellectual atmosphere was part of the Chicago econ culture, which I look back on very fondly and really enjoyed.

We have happy hours for doctoral students now and the economists are always there. So I can confirm that they still grab fun wherever they can find it.

They grab fun. They understand the value of free in the same way. And I should also add that I believe, Kelly, correct me if I'm wrong, you are not the first alum of the econ department to talk about the free pastries that would be put out by-

That's correct.

... The Reg. So yes.

No, I was just going to say probably not the first and probably not the last, and that actually tells you something about the-

A tried and true tradition.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Oh, no, this is great. I mean, this is terrific. And again, I mean, thank you so much for just walking us through really the whole trajectory, everything from arriving at U Chicago and your time here, your dissertation, your career since. For me, your career trajectory just matches so well with what you did with your dissertation that it's almost like, well, of course, yes, what you did makes a lot of sense and people do think about the environment and energy markets and so forth. And so it does seem maybe compared to some other folks that we've interviewed others where you're like, "Okay, can you tell us how your dissertation related to this?" Yours seems very apparent, but I would love to ask nevertheless, how do you see your time, your training in economics impacting what you do in your career? And then Kelly could ask that question of what led you to even study economics in the first place.

In terms of my time at Chicago and how it shaped my current work and career path, I would say a few things. So first, Chicago's approach to economics has always emphasized the positive, so “what is” over the normative or “what should be”. And more popular ways to describe this concept include the saying that there's no free lunch, economics is a dismal science, and [what] one of my advisors had told me, [which is] the ratio of doable ideas to good ideas is relatively low. 

The Chicago emphasis on the positive versus the normative has really been relevant in my career because I've had to come to terms with outcomes that I may not personally like or want, but they're true for good reason, meaning there's an economic basis for them. So for example, there are many interesting and potentially highly impactful technologies in the climate change mitigation space, which are not yet mature and therefore more expensive than incumbent solutions.

And while I might wish to wave a magic wand and implement these now, they're currently uneconomic and so they won't be adopted until they're comparable in cost to incumbent solutions. Similarly, there have been many occasions in my consulting and corporate career where I thought a company should adopt a particular strategy or make a particular investment and unfortunately various barriers prevented this. So differing incentives across stakeholders to act or just simply the high cost of acting. And anticipating and identifying these issues early really helped me to prioritize initiatives that would be more doable than others and in some cases even apply targeted strategies to overcome those barriers.

A second thing that has really stuck with me is the rigor with which Chicago taught me how to think about problems, to apply a structured and disciplined approach to framing those problems, to analyze them from first principles and to test them against real world observation and data. And then finally, I saw at Chicago the variety of contexts to which economics and economic thinking could be applied as long as one was curious and observant about the world and let that curiosity drive the questions to be answered. And Gary Becker was my dissertation supervisor and his application of economics to non-traditional areas like discrimination, the family, human capital, and crime have really stayed with me in my career as I've tried to apply economics to sustainability, which is fundamentally about understanding non-economic impacts in areas like the environment and then figuring out how to make trade-offs between both non-economic and economic impacts.

So I think I've admitted this on this podcast before, but I've never taken an economics class despite the fact that my dad has taught economics. So I want to understand why other people get interested in economics even like before adulthood, you were studying economics at the college level. So what drove you to do that?

I mean, in high school, I took classes in both microeconomics and macroeconomics and I really liked them. And basically economics is founded on the core principle of scarcity. So you can't have everything you want and that leads to trade-offs and that actually, that idea really resonated with me. And as I said, that really has been a hallmark of everything I've done in my career in business. And unlike classes that seem to require learning and remembering a lot of facts that often seemed random and occasionally conceptually unrelated, I really like that economics is based on a coherent framework. You only need to know and apply a few key principles and everything can be derived from that. So it's a very parsimonious discipline.

I also like, and I know that you guys do a lot of writing, but I actually like that economics does not require a lot of writing. And so I evolved from someone that actually initially wanted to be a journalist and focus on international relations, but I discovered I didn't enjoy writing and in particular, writing long papers. And so I already mentioned my Chicago dissertation was only 44 pages and I like that brevity and it's like that old saying, "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one." And I actually think that in economics that, as I said, parsimony is really attractive for me. And then as I said, I also really like that economics can be applied to so many different aspects of the world, obviously the economy itself, but also these less traditional areas like the family and law and policy and the environment. So it's really an all-encompassing approach to thinking about many problems.

Thanks, this has been great. This has been terrific. Again, I've learned a lot and I mean that when I said before, wow. In today's world, I meet so many of our PhD students who are like, "I want my research to matter. I want what I'm doing to matter. I enjoy the academic discussions, yes indeed, but I really want to feel like I'm doing work that matters." And I think what's been exciting about our conversation today is you are doing work that matters and I think that that's something that'll be fantastic for many of our students to hear. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.

Thank you again to both of you for having me on the podcast. It's really been a pleasure to talk with you and I greatly enjoyed reminiscing about my time in Chicago where I made very many good friends and the intellectual environment, which I think is unique. And it was interesting to reread my dissertation for the first time in more than 25 years.

Thank you so much.

Thank you both.