PODCAST · science
VoxTalks Economics
by VoxTalks
Learn about groundbreaking new research, commentary and policy ideas from the world's leading economists. Presented by Tim Phillips.
Episodes
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S9 Ep59: Life after divorce
Who gets the kids? Courts aim to decide custody in the child's best interests, but nobody has had the data to test how well those decisions work. Gordon Dahl (UC San Diego, CEPR), Costas Meghir (Yale, CEPR) and seven co-authors built the data themselves. They collected more than 56,000 Swedish...
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S9 Ep58: Not wearing Prada
Since March 2022, it has been harder to buy an iPhone in Russia, because Apple chose to stop selling there. So did Prada, Renault, Starbucks, Nike and more than 1,000 other firms. These private sanctions added to the official sanctions imposed by 45 countries. Beata Javorcik (EBRD, Oxford, CEPR)...
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S9 Ep57: Merit, masters and China's imperial exam
For more than 1,300 years, China chose its top officials by written exam. Its top officials were chosen meritocratic ally -- or were they? When the results came out, each successful candidate went to pay his respects to the men who had marked his exam. He called the examiner master, and the bond...
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S9 Ep56: Decoupling from China after Trump's Trade Wars
In March 2025, Apple chartered cargo flights to deliver 600 tonnes of iPhones from India to the United States. A year earlier, four in five smartphones that imported to the US came from China. One of the aims of US trade policy has been to decouple the US economy from China. So is the strategy...
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S9 Ep55: Loosening inheritance law
In most of the world you do not get to choose who inherits your money. Across continental Europe, Latin America, and countries governed by Islamic law, a minimum share of your estate will be reserved for your children, your spouse, and in some places your surviving parents. Write a will that...
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S9 Ep54: Does sacking the manager work?
Your football team keeps losing. The season is slipping away. One thing can be changed by Friday, and the crowd is already singing about it: sack the manager. Jan van Ours (Erasmus School of Economics, CEPR, Feyenoord fan) has looked at seven seasons of the Dutch top flight and 31 managers who…
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S9 Ep53: Lessons from Populism in Latin America
The new episode of VoxTalks Economics traces the effects of South Americans populism, left and right. Alejandro Werner (Georgetown Americas Institute) is one of the authors of a new paper that traces populist governments across Latin America back to 1970. He argues that they follow a strikingly...
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S9 Ep52: The Dollar Anchor Is Slipping
April 2025: Liberation Day. President Trump announces sweeping new tariffs. And then, the dollar did something a safe haven currency is not supposed to do: it fell. Tarek Hassan (Boston University, CEPR), working with Thomas Mertens, Jingye Wang and Tony Zhang, has been investigating what makes a...
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S9 Ep51: Fiscal Populism and Monetary Policy
There is a saying in Spanish: get burned by hot milk, and the sight of a cow makes you cry. New research implies that, decades after a populist government leaves office, the central bank it once tried to control is still flinching. Martín Uribe (Columbia) and Nicolás Magud (IMF) have investigated...
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S9 Ep50: Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Exchange Rate
Textbook economics says a tariff should strengthen a country's currency. Since the start of 2025, as US tariffs rose ... and the dollar fell. In the first of four episodes of Voxtalks based on papers presented at the second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference, Alfonso...
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S9 Ep49: Combatting sexual harassment in the military
Norwegian conscripts arrive at boot camp straight out of school. They are assigned at random to a shared room and they live in it for the next eight weeks. Whatever the culture of that room turns out to be, they are stuck with it. We know that the military everywhere has a poor record on sexual...
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S9 Ep48: What price to save Japan's ghost towns?
In the oldest Japanese municipalities, close to half the residents are already over 65. As young people move to cities, the retailers close, then the clinics, then the bus that used to reach the next town. Rural Japan is not simply ageing: it is emptying. Elisa Giannone (CREI, CEPR) and her...
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S9 Ep47: The Next Generation: PSE 2026
Travel broadens the mind. So the Voxtalks visits a conference, we find the most interesting research from economists just starting out, and hand three of them a microphone. Ad that is today's episode, recorded at the CEPR Paris School of Economics Policy Forum 2026. Listen to hear three findings...
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S9 Ep46: Absorbing shocks since 1891
Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2026. A country wants a stable exchange rate, it wants money to move freely across its borders, and it wants to set its own interest rates. It's a well-known trilemma. Central bankers must pick any two, because you cannot have all three. History, it turns…
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S9 Ep45: Tariff Confusion
If you run a business that exports to the United States, how big is the tariff you have to pay? In 2025 that question was hard to answer. Between February and December, 53 separate announcements introduced, delayed, reinstated or changed US tariffs, with different countries and products pulled in...
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S9 Ep44: How superpowers shape trade
Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris School of Economics. Tariffs move trade around, but so does economic power. When one economy dominates, other countries fall into step with it. They trade with the dominant economy, and also with each other. Alberto Martin (Barcelona School of…
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S9 Ep43: Navigating industrial policy
Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris. In 2019 the IMF called the increasing adoption of industrial policy: "The return of the policy that shall not be named". No one is scared to name it in 2026. Governments in rich and poor economies alike are intervening to change what their countries...
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S9 Ep42: The Safety Paradox
Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris School of Economics, June 2026. In 1941 the United States banned oil exports to Japan, to punish aggression without fighting a war. Historians now argue the embargo did the opposite, and hastened Japan's entry into the war. Isabelle Méjean (Sciences…
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S9 Ep41: Making teenagers read newspapers
French teenagers carry a smartphone with access to almost anything, but few of them have been using it to read the news. Julia Cagé (Sciences Po, CEPR) ran an experiment to test the one barrier everyone assumes matters most: the price of a newspaper. She and her co-authors gave free digital...
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S9 Ep40: Are net zero commitments greenwash?
Sixty-three percent of large companies worldwide had made a net zero commitment by 2023, up from close to none in 2018. But if the target date is 2050, that's several corporate lifetimes away, and the planet needs emission reductions today. What actually changes in the boardroom when a pledge is...
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S9 Ep39: Europe in 2050
Recorded at the Paris School of Economics-CEPR Policy Forum 2026. Europe is under attack from the US, and under a different kind of attack from China. That is Olivier Blanchard's diagnosis. Blanchard (MIT, Paris School of Economics, Peterson Institute) is one of four economists leading Europe…
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S9 Ep38: Europe in the Middle
China cannot sell as much as it used to in the United States. That trade has to go somewhere, and somewhere might be Europe. In this week's VoxTalk, Tim Phillips asks Pol Antràs (Harvard) and Beata Javorcik (EBRD, Oxford) what this means for European producers and consumers. Antràs and Andrea...
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S9 Ep37: Addressing Global Imbalances
Episode recorded on 19 June 2026 at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum in Paris. Twice before, the world's savings and debts have piled up in the wrong places, and twice the imbalance broke something. The first time it took the Plaza Accord to fix it. The second time it took a global financial crisis. Now...
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S9 Ep36: Helping the over-50s find work
Lose your job at 25 and someone will help you find another. Lose it at 55 and the talk quietly turns to how you might wind down towards retirement. Policymakers tend to assume job search training works for the young and not the old, so they rarely spend money trying. Bas van der Klaauw (Tinbergen...
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S9 Ep35: The success of the embedded state
Who kept the courts sitting and the streetlights lit when the state had almost no money to pay anyone? Two hundred years ago, British local government ran on unpaid labour. In a parliamentary survey of the boroughs from 1835, two in three of the people doing local government work were not paid at...
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S9 Ep34: Making defence spending pay
Defence spending is rising whether voters like it or not. The UK has committed to 2.5% of national income and aims for nearer 3.5% over the next decade, £30bn a year for each percentage point. What does the country get back? Can defence spending be pro-growth? In this week's VoxTalk, John Van...
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S9 Ep33: Did the sewing machine liberate women?
In January 1860 the New York Times gave its blessing to a new machine: the sewing machine. These "iron needle-women", it wrote, were the only invention that could be claimed “chiefly for women's benefit”. Sewing was women's work in the nineteenth century, rich or poor, and a machine could now do…
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S9 Ep32: The digital money supply
Every day, billions of transactions settle between strangers who have no idea which bank the other uses. That lack of friction is not automatic. Nine-tenths of the money in daily circulation has been created by commercial banks, but it stays trustworthy only because central banks stand behind it,...
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S9 Ep31: How well does patent screening work?
Someone once held a patent on the swing. A piece of wood. Two ropes. The US Patent Office granted it. How often does that actually happen, and what does it cost when the system gets it wrong? Or, how often is a valid patent claim rejected? Until now, no one knew. Tim Phillips talks to Mark...
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S9 Ep30: Redefining the monetary standard
The fiat money system has survived the Great Inflation, the global financial crisis, and a pandemic. But can it survive digital currencies? Bitcoin and the blockchain solved a genuine problem in computer science: how to stop people spending the same money twice. Forty years of successful…
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S9 Ep29: Guns and Butter
Europe's NATO members have pledged 3.5% of GDP to rearmament. The political argument is already about which social programmes will be sacrificed to pay for this, when the government chooses guns instead of butter. What does history tell us about what politicians will do? Christoph Trebesch and...
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S9 Ep28: Immigration and integration in Europe
More than one in eight people living in the EU today was born in another country. In fourteen of the bloc's largest economies, it is closer to one in six. For ten years, the same team of researchers has asked what happens to those people next: do they find work, close the gap with their…
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S9 Ep27: The right to choose to die
Content note: this episode discusses assisted dying, end-of-life choices, and suicide. Some listeners may find the content distressing. In April 2024, Daniel Kahneman — one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century — emailed his close friends to say goodbye. He was 90 years...
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S9 Ep26: The public origins of American innovation
The standard story of American innovation features Silicon Valley, venture capital, and the heroic startup founder.When you trace the history of the internet, GPS, mass-produced penicillin, or the COVID vaccine, the starting point is not a term sheet but a government grant. How much does this...
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S9 Ep25: Rebalancing the Chinese economy
In 2003, Premier Wen Jiabao warned that China's growth model was unbalanced between supply and demand, over-reliant on investment and exports. More than 20 years later, the imbalance is smaller — but China is vastly larger. What its economy produces and exports now moves global markets. The...
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S9 Ep24: Stablecoins and Global Imbalances
A radical macroeconomic experiment is under way at exactly the moment the US external position is showing signs of real stress. Gilles Moëc, Chief Economist at AXA, has written a chapter in the fourth Paris Report, published jointly by CEPR and Bruegel, on stablecoins: what they are, why the US...
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S9 Ep23: Global imbalances redux
Three times since the 1970s, global imbalances have grown large. In the 1980s, the US trade deficit ballooned under Volcker's tight money and Reagan's tax cuts and military spending. In the 2000s, a global savings glut and then a US housing credit boom pushed the deficit to 6% of GDP. Today, the...
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S9 Ep22: World War Trade
On 2 April 2025, the United States imposed tariffs on almost every country on earth. The next day, China responded with export controls on the entire world. In the space of one week, world trade had been weaponised as it has never been in peacetime. Richard Baldwin of IMD Business School, the...
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S9 Ep21: The Bank of England's capital mistake?
"When you look at the world now, does it look more uncertain or less uncertain?" In December 2025, the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee (FPC) answered that question by cutting the equity capital requirement for UK banks. David Aikman (NIESR) and John Vickers (University of Oxford)…
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S9 Ep20: What triggered January 6?
Two explanations circulated immediately after the March to Save America on January 6, 2021 turned into a riot: a mob manipulated by a demagogue, or ordinary citizens defending democracy against a stolen election. Konstantin Sonin, David Van Dijcke, and Austin Wright have used anonymised location...
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S9 Ep19: Can blockchain decentralise money, contracts, and finance?
Every Bitcoin transaction needs to be verified on the blockchain. There is no central authority that does this, but Bitcoin's blockchain has run uninterrupted since 2009 and now carries a market capitalisation of $1.3 trillion, roughly 4% of US GDP. Its original promise was more radical: that we…
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S9 Ep18: Will AI transform economic growth?
Could AI transform our economies to produce explosive growth? Most economists are sceptical at best. Anton Korinek of the University of Virginia, leader of the CEPR research policy network on AI, thinks the threshold is closer than those models suggest. In his latest work, Korinek, Tom Davidson,...
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S9 Ep17: Sanctions and financial repression
Financial repression forces banks and citizens to hold government debt on terms the market would never accept. Economists have called it distortionary for fifty years. It never went away. Oleg Itskhoki and Dmitry Mukhin study what happens when a government runs out of options. Their paper traces...
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S9 Ep16: What's next for Ukraine: The labour market
Ukraine has lost close to a quarter of its civilian workforce since the invasion. Three and a half million workers left government-controlled areas: mobilised into the armed forces, displaced inside the country, gone abroad as refugees, or killed. Giacomo Anastasia, Tito Boeri, and Oleksandr…
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S9 Ep15: What's next for Ukraine: Reconstruction
Ukraine's cities were failing long before the Russian invasion began. Kyiv and Lviv ranked among the 40 most congested cities in the world, yet neither makes the top 100 by population. Ninety per cent of Ukraine's housing stock was built before 1990. Its urban infrastructure was designed for a...
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S9 Ep14: What’s next for Ukraine: Investment
Ukraine will emerge from this war with enormous debt. The conventional wisdom treats that as an obstacle: investors weigh it before committing capital, and the burden slows the recovery before it starts. Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Maurice Obstfeld of UC Berkeley argue the opposite. A thorough...
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S9 Ep13: The alpha political male
Recorded live at the CEPR Annual Symposium. We seem to be talking about the behaviour of alpha males on social media a lot recently. But what happens when we put them in charge of a country? The work of Mario Carillo of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona attempts to answer that question. He talks…
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S9 Ep12: Management under the spotlight
What type of manager would you be? An experiment in Ethiopia set out to measure the management traits of young professionals by setting them challenges in a video studio, and along the way also uncovered valuable (and surprising) information about the type of manager that employees and employers...
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S9 Ep11: The next generation: Paris ‘25
Recorded live at the CEPR Annual Symposium in Paris. When VoxTalks Economics visits a symposium or conference, we try to find the most interesting new research from economists who are just starting out in their careers. In Paris we invited three of them to the CEPR Office to tell us about their...
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S9 Ep10: How many people die when the US cuts foreign aid?
Another special episode recorded at the CEPR annual symposium in Paris. On 20 Jan 2025 when the Trump administration declared foreign aid “antithetical" to American values and suddenly ended many of its overseas programmes. How many lives were lost as a result, and can others step up to try to...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does VoxTalks Economics have?
VoxTalks Economics currently has 486 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is VoxTalks Economics about?
Learn about groundbreaking new research, commentary and policy ideas from the world's leading economists. Presented by Tim Phillips.
How often does VoxTalks Economics release new episodes?
VoxTalks Economics publishes regularly with 486 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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VoxTalks Economics is created and hosted by VoxTalks.
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