College of Business MVPs

 

By Micaela Myers

 

Economist John List

Why do inner-city schools continue to fail? Why do people give to charity? Why is there a gender pay gap? Why do people vote? These are the types of questions that interest professor, author and acclaimed economist John List. Standard methods can give you the numbers but don’t explain why. Understanding why is imperative to finding solutions, so List turned to field experiments. 

“Field experiments give you a chance to exercise some level of control of the data-generating process to learn about whether the theory is correct or not and then to test the why behind your results,” he says. 

List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and the author of 10 books, the most recent being “The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale.”

“We need to focus on interventions that will scale,” says List, who grew up in Sun Prairie, Wisc. “If we want great interventions to work at scale, we really need to understand the science of scaling.” 

Because his work deals with people, there are many variables. A subtle change in the environment can cause people to act differently. His work as chief economist at Uber illustrates how field experiments get to the why of what people do. 

“I rolled out tipping at Uber in a nationwide field experiment in 2017,” he says. “We found that, in America, only 1 percent of people tip on every trip. Three out of five people never ever tip, but when I had them make the tip decision face-to-face with the driver, over 95 percent of those people tipped. What was really surprising was how important social pressure and social norms were on the tipping decision.”

List is now chief economist at Walmart, where he’s heading up Project Gigaton, which helps Walmart’s thousands of suppliers share technology to reduce CO₂ emissions. He also serves as faculty director of the University of Chicago Becker Friedman Institute for Economics through which he is engaging the more than 200 economists across campus to advance frontier research and global impact of economics. With his wife and fellow researcher, Dana Suskind, John serves as co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health, a pioneering initiative focused on early childhood language development and its impact on brain growth and lifelong learning.

List’s awards include the Arrow Prize for Senior Economists in 2008, the Kenneth Galbraith Award in 2010, the Yrjo Jahnsson Lecture Prize in 2012, the Klein Lecture Prize in 2016, the Hartsook Growing Philanthropy Award in 2017 and the R. K. Cho Economics Prize in 2023. Still, he considers his time at UW as one of his career highlights. 

“The professors all had a unified vision that they wanted to use economics to change the world,” says List, who graduated with his Ph.D. in economics in 1996. “A good mentor helps you find the path, but a great mentor helps you forge your own path, and I was lucky enough to find three really three great mentors at UW — Shelby Gerking, Charles Mason and Jason Shogren — who really helped me forge my own path, and that was really important for my career.”

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Coinbase VP of U.S. Policy Kara Calvert

Kara Calvert grew up making the trip from Riverton to the University of Wyoming for the annual Tri Delta sorority breakfast with her mom — so it was no surprise when she chose to follow in her mother’s footsteps. At UW, Calvert became a leader in student government and started the Safe Ride program, which provides free safe weekend transportation to students and community members. 

“There were so many different opportunities you could take advantage of at UW,” says Calvert, who graduated with her bachelor’s degree in business administration in 2001. “It really prepared me for my career. After graduation, I went to work for U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi from Wyoming, so I still felt so connected to the state.” 

With Enzi, she focused on the technology portfolio. “That really threw me eyeballs-deep into the river of technology issues that are at the core of U.S. national and economic security,” she says. “I also had the good fortune of working closely with the Senate Banking Committee. When I left, I went to work for a tech trade association, which really gave me a broad-based view of all the different technologies that were out there.”

After helping to build a small lobbying firm — Franklin Square Group — for 13 years, Calvert joined Coinbase in 2021. As the largest U.S.-based crypto trading platform, Coinbase now boasts more than 105 million users worldwide and did over $1 trillion in transaction volume last year. 

Crypto doesn’t cleanly fit into traditional financial regulatory frameworks. It requires states and countries to rethink regulations, which is where Calvert’s role as the vice president of U.S. policy becomes important. Calvert is responsible for Coinbase’s policy efforts at the federal, state and local levels, which continues to keep her connected to Wyoming.

“Right now, we’re working on federal legislation being led by Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis that would regulate how digital assets are issued, traded and sold,” she says. “It’s my dream job, to be honest. I’m part of something that is bigger than just my company. It’s groundbreaking. You get to engage on an issue that’s brand new and ever changing. This is going to be transformative for the world.”

 

In recognition of her leadership, Calvert was featured in The Washington Post’s “50 People Shaping Our Society in 2025” series.

Calvert loves Coinbase’s customer-first approach, which also means a thoughtful regulatory approach. In 2018, she helped Wyoming move to improve its cryptocurrency regulations.  

“Wyoming had a restriction on their money transmission license requirements,” Calvert says. “It was such a fun experience to go home and be able to lobby on something about which I felt so strongly. That was the year Wyoming crypto legislation really started to pick up steam.”

 

Although her career keeps her plenty busy, Calvert is excited to volunteer on the advisory committee of the Smithsonian Women’s History Museum’s Wyoming chapter. She’s also a proud mom of four children.

“I get really excited to tell my kids, ‘We’re going home to Wyoming to see Grandma Ruby and the rest of the family,’” Calvert says. “I love seeing the amazing things happening in the state, and I’m proud to show them off. It’s a great place to be from, and it’s a great place to come home to.”