Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is November 21st, 2012, and my guest is Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago,

and the author of the redistribution recession, how labor market distortions contracted the

economy.

And that book is the topic of our discussion today.

Casey, welcome to Econ Talk.

I'm very glad to begin invited.

Now there are many different explanations for the recession that began in December 2007,

and the unusually poor recovery that followed that, and many of these explanations are

macroeconomic in nature, as one would expect, meaning they look at how various aggregates,

such as the money supply or aggregate demand or economy-wide interest rates or the level

of indebtedness, how did those macroeconomic variables affect the overall health of the

economy?

Your book, which is a very technical work of applied statistics, takes a very different

approach.

...