Erika Beras
Erika Beras (she/her) is a reporter and host for NPR's Planet Money podcast.
Prior to joining the team in 2021 she spent four years as a reporter at Marketplace.
As a freelancer, she was a regular contributor to Scientific American podcasts and filed stories for NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Latino USA. She also contributed to PRI's The World, the BBC and Monocle 24 Radio and wrote stories for National Geographic and NewYorker.com.
Before that, she spent a decade as a staff reporter for NPR Member station WESA and at The Miami Herald.
Her reporting has taken her places as varied as The Democratic Republic of Congo, Switzerland and Erie, Pennsylvania.
She has been awarded grants, fellowships and awards from Radio Television Digital News Association, National Association of Science Writers, The International Center for Journalists, the International Women's Media Foundation, The Center for Health Reporting, The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, Third Coast International Audio Festival and others.
Beras is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer and a graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. A native Spanish speaker, she grew up in New York City and lives in Pittsburgh.
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Despite a free trade agreement with Mexico, U.S. potato growers had been mostly blocked from selling their potatoes in Mexico for more than 24 years. Planet Money traveled to Idaho to understand why.
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When buying and selling homes, there is no national record of who owns a property, who has a title to it. The Planet Money team has the story of a new kind of villain trying to exploit that system.
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When a little-known tech company failed, thousands of people couldn’t access the millions they deposited into financial technology companies. Here's what the industry reveals about banking regulation.
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Airline travel used to be glamorous, lavish even. How did the experience of flying coach become so widely disparaged? It's a five decade long story of deregulation. And in the end, we customers may just be getting exactly what we asked for.
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Last year U.S. Steel announced it would be sold to Nippon Steel, a Japanese steel company. U.S. Steel's journey from its perch as the biggest company in the country to this moment started decades ago.
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Our Planet Money team regularly explains the financial world to adults. But recently they gave themselves the challenge of explaining the complex workings of the economy... to kids.
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Typically, when demand for a product goes up, so does the price. But at Thanksgiving, when demand for turkeys is at its highest, turkey prices drop. Our Planet Money team looks into this mystery.
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All-you-can-eat buffets highlight an economic idea known as the flat rate pricing bias. To explain how it works, our Planet Money team went to the buffet capital of America: Las Vegas.
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In an unlikely country, Uruguay, a particle physicist figured out how to convert energy grids to renewable energy. We tell the story of how he did it.
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Almost 50 years ago, a band made an incredible song about Inflation. Then the song was lost to the dustbin of history. Now, Planet Money is on a mission to make this record a hit.
