S3E26: Javier Gardeazabal, Political Economy and Econometrics, University of the Basque Country

The Mixtape with Scott

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Welcome to this week’s episode of the Mixtape with Scott, a podcast devoted to listening to the personal stories of living economists and creating an oral history of the profession. This episode is partly inspired by my visit to San Sebastián, Spain, with my daughter right now and partly inspired by a 2003 article co-authored with Alberto Abadie studying the effect of terrorism on economic growth that introduced the synthetic control estimator. My guest is Javier Gardeazabal, a professor at the University of the Basque Country.

Javier Gardeazabal is a professor at the University of the Basque Country whose body of work has covered topics in macroeconomics, time series econometrics, labor economics, cultural economics, and political economy. He did his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in May 1991, an experience that he will share about in the interview. He is from the Basque Country and returned to the Basque Country after graduation where he has been ever since. It is therefore inspiring to me that his home became the topic of a paper that he is perhaps most widely known for — a seminal contribution to both causal inference and measuring the economic costs of terrorism, coauthored with Alberto Abadie, in the 2003 American Economic Review paper, “The Economic Cost of Conflict: A Case Study of the Basque Country.” This groundbreaking study made a major contribution to causal inference by introducing the synthetic control estimator, but also assessing the economic impact of terrorism on economic growth in the Basque Country. It was a major contribution to the field possessing all the elements of great articles in economics — an important question answered extraordinarily well with clarity and rigor.

This influential paper not only cast a massive shadow over the evolution of causal inference and econometrics; it also accelerated Javier’s own research to include not only macroeconomics, but also the economics of terrorism and conflict. His career is evidence of an economist who followed his curiosity and intellectual interests to include understanding the economic costs of terrorism, introducing methods for measuring the aggregate cost of conflict, and the impact of political violence on economic well-being, but also exchange rate dynamics, time series econometrics, cultural policies, optimal test scoring methods, gender wage discrimination and more. Javier’s versatility is evident in his ability to adapt to and excel in a variety of economic topics and methodologies, continually evolving to address new and relevant economic issues.

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