Hi, this is Kylian. Nice to meet you.

Kylian Hooper is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

His specialty?

I study how shocks to individual firms and individual households affect the economy more broadly.

He recently published a paper, along with two co-authors,

that tries to answer a pair of important questions.

The first question is, what are the effects of discrimination on the economy more broadly?

This question is even more pressing in the midst of a global reckoning around discrimination.

And the second question?

The second question is, what types of individuals are most important in the economy?

So what if you lose highly qualified, highly skilled top executives, top managers?

How does that affect the economy?

You might think Hooper was asking these questions in the context of the so-called great resignation.

That's the trend driven by the COVID-19 pandemic

of people quitting their jobs to find something more meaningful.

But no, that is not the context Hooper was thinking about.

He was thinking about discrimination in the 1930s in Germany,

discrimination against Jewish business executives.

Jews were generally very well integrated into the top levels of the German economic system.

They ran all types of firms, firms that we still know today, BMW, Dandrobenz, Aliens.

These are all firms that had important Jewish executives, Deutsche Bank,

still the largest bank today, had a Jewish CEO called Oscar Rasserman.

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