Podcast · Tech & Science

VoxTalks Economics

Learn about groundbreaking new research, commentary and policy ideas from the world's leading economists. Presented by Tim Phillips.

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 21 min
Latest: 9 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

9 Oct 2026 · 19 min

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) and her co-authors wanted to know if private sanctions did anything more than generate good headlines. To do this, they matched millions of Russian customs records to the trademarks on the goods, so they could tell an iPhone from a Samsung phone and a Gucci scarf from a Gucci bag. Would imports of…

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S9 · E57 · 2 Oct 2026 · 21 min
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 lasted for life. Ruixue Jia (UC San Diego, CEPR) and her co-author Ying Bai followed 24,269 graduates of the Qing dynasty's imperial examination, from 1644 to 1905, to see who reached the top of the imperial state. A high mark in the examination was important, but so did an examiner who later rose to…
S9 · E56 · 25 Sep 2026 · 29 min
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 working? Chad Bown (PIIE, CEPR) tells Tim Phillips how he examined the US import data product by product to see how American importers coped with Trump's second trade war. In consumer electronics, many firms quietly built a second supply chain in tariff-exempt countries before 2025, and switched…
S9 · E55 · 18 Sep 2026 · 26 min
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 ignores them and the law overrules you. If you want a head start in life, choose your parents carefully. Switzerland changed the rules in January 2023. The compulsory share for children fell by one third and the share reserved for surviving parents disappeared altogether. In this week's VoxTalk, Marius…
S9 · E54 · 11 Sep 2026 · 18 min
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 were sacrificed mid-season. To work out whether any of them deserved it, he uses bookmaker odds and expected goals to distinguish bad play from bad luck. The new-manager bounce is real: results improve after a new manager walks in. But also, not real: clubs that don't sack the manager have an upturn…
S9 · E53 · 4 Sep 2026 · 33 min
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 similar script: they expand spending, weaken the institutions built to restrain them, and ride the wave until inflation catches up with them. But the most recent generation of leaders -- Chávez and Maduro, the Kirchners, Correa, and Morales -- lasted longer than their predecessors. Why? The research…
S9 · E52 · 2 Sep 2026 · 26 min
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 currency the global anchor. Being the world's biggest economy helps, but what really matters is how far an economy's shocks affect world prices. Tariffs reduce this effect. But are we near a tipping point, when the euro takes over as the global reserve currency? We might be closer than you think…
S9 · E51 · 28 Aug 2026 · 16 min
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 the long-run effect of populist governments that leaned on their central banks to print money and feed inflation. They find that these central banks raise interest rates more aggressively than others when inflation drifts above target, even decades later. This is the second of four episodes drawn…
S9 · E50 · 26 Aug 2026 · 24 min
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 Merendino (Bocconi University) and Tommaso Monacelli (Bocconi University, CEPR) tell Tim Phillips what they found when they looked for reasons. Their conclusion: for tariffs, it's not size, it is how permanent people expect it to be. They call this structural trade policy uncertainty. When that…
S9 · E49 · 21 Aug 2026 · 21 min
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 harassment. Johanna Rickne (Stockholm University, CEPR) and her co-authors wanted to reduce its acceptance, and the number of incidents. Compulsory training, standing a in a room a showing a PowerPoint, has a poor record. It can even inspire a backlash. Instead, they included two pieces of information…
S9 · E48 · 14 Aug 2026 · 18 min
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 co-authors have analysed Japan's 1,741 municipalities from 1980 onwards. The oldest quarter of them lost around 26% of their population by 2010; the youngest quarter grew by 22%, and the gap between them is still widening. Taxing city dwellers could reverse the trend. But that's a century-long policy,…
S9 · E47 · 7 Aug 2026 · 33 min
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 that undercut conventional wisdom. Guido Lamarmora (University of Nottingham) argues that the usual policy prescription for developing economies that want to industrialise of raising agricultural productivity can deepen their reliance on farming rather than break it. Costanza Tomaselli (Imperial…
S9 · E46 · 5 Aug 2026 · 20 min
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 out, did not read that memo. Eric Monnet has spent years reading the balance sheets that central bankers kept on each other. Since 1891 the Bank of France paid teams of multilingual economists to copy out the weekly and monthly accounts of every other central bank in the world. Those ledgers, now…
S9 · E45 · 31 Jul 2026 · 31 min
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 or exempted each time. Kalina Manova (UCL, CEPR) and her colleagues built a database of every one of those announcements, but they also measured the confusion that those announcements created. She tells Tim Phillips about how tariff confusion has become a second tax on trade, as confusion puts off…
S9 · E44 · 29 Jul 2026 · 16 min
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 Economics, CEPR) is one of a team that has tracked the influence of hegemons, large dominant economies, on trade from the start of the 19th century. In our latest VoxTalk he tells Tim Phillips about how they used treaties (not necessarily about trade) as a proxy for alignment, and built a database of 77,000…
S9 · E43 · 24 Jul 2026 · 21 min
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 produce, and the pace has picked up sharply. Zsóka Kóczán (EBRD) was one of the leads on the Transition Report 2024-25, which draws on a database of more than 31,000 industrial policies in 150 economies. She talks to Tim Phillips about who is using these policies, and the mistakes that happen when…
S9 · E42 · 22 Jul 2026 · 20 min
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 Po, CEPR) calls this "The safety paradox". Trade between rivals makes war more expensive. Cut that trade to protect your interests, and you make conflict cheaper, for your rival as well as for you. In a new VoxTalk she talks to Tim Phillips about economic coercion, decoupling, and why Europe should…
S9 · E41 · 17 Jul 2026 · 20 min
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 subscriptions to Le Monde and media education to thousands of French high school students for a year, and then tracked what the students actually read. It's a bit like persuading kids to eat vegetables when there are fries on the table, she tells Tim Phillips. Can a free subscription persuade France's…
S9 · E40 · 15 Jul 2026 · 24 min
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 signed? Simon Dietz (LSE, CEPR) has tracked climate management practices and emissions at nearly 2,000 companies to find out. He tells Tim Phillips that the picture is not the one that either side of the debate might expect. A net zero pledge doesn't usually signify an immediate cut in emissions, but…
S9 · E39 · 10 Jul 2026 · 21 min
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 2050, a new CEPR initiative asking where Europe wants to be in 25 years, and how it gets there. Blanchard's overriding principle: a vision without plumbing goes nowhere, and plumbing without vision is just reacting to the next tweet. Who can combine the vision and the plumbing, and produce ideas that we…
S9 · E38 · 8 Jul 2026 · 21 min
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 Presbitero have mapped which countries and sectors face the sharpest competition from redirected Chinese exports, and which stand to gain. Does cheap Chinese tech ease Europe's energy cost crisis, or squeeze European manufacturers of wind turbines and electric cars? If Europe decides to take the gains…
S9 · E37 · 3 Jul 2026 · 25 min
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 we are in a third wave. Gita Gopinath (Harvard, former IMF Chief Economist and First Deputy Managing Director) and Philip Lane (European Central Bank, CEPR) join Tim Phillips to ask what is different this time. Household and bank balance sheets are stronger than before 2008. But the fragility has…
S9 · E36 · 1 Jul 2026 · 19 min
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 Institute) thinks they got that wrong. In this week's VoxTalks Economics, he tells Tim Phillips about a Dutch experiment that put older unemployed workers through an intensive programme built on one idea: teach people over 50 to find work the way younger workers already do, by working their social…
S9 · E35 · 26 Jun 2026 · 20 min
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 all. James Robinson (University of Chicago, CEPR) explains how this succeeded in this week's episode of VoxTalks Economics. Robinson and his co-authors call this the "embedded state". Members of the elite willingly took the unpaid jobs because the postings carried prestige and led to Parliament,…
S9 · E34 · 19 Jun 2026 · 26 min
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 Reenen (LSE) argues that getting a return on investment based on innovation need not be left to luck. For example nuclear power, GPS and the internet all began as military projects. The spillovers can be planned for; the trick is to make defence spending innovation-rich, and make procurement work…
S9 · E33 · 12 Jun 2026 · 19 min
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 it in a fraction of the time. So did it set women free? Philipp Ager and Davide Coluccia have traced the adoption of the sewing machine in Massachusetts between 1850 and 1900, using census records and digitised business directories to work out who was exposed to it, in the factory and in the home.…
S9 · E32 · 5 Jun 2026 · 27 min
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, and keep the system in balance. In this week’s episode Tim Phillips talks to Stephen Cecchetti (Brandeis University, CEPR) about what happens when new forms of digital money test that architecture. Cecchetti is one of the authors of the eighth Barcelona Report in The Future of Banking series, part…
S9 · E31 · 29 May 2026 · 33 min
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 Schankerman of LSE and CEPR, who with co-authors William Matcham spent eight years building the tools to find out. Using natural language processing across a dataset of around one million patent applications, twenty million claims, and fifty-five million examiner decisions, they measure how similar each…
S9 · E30 · 22 May 2026 · 26 min
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 inflation control means central bank money is stable; that is the stability in stablecoins, attempting to solve the volatility problem. What's next? What if the unit of account itself were indexed to consumer prices? Digitalisation might finally make that approach viable at scale. Price stability, by design.…
S9 · E29 · 15 May 2026 · 21 min
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 Johannes Marzian spent four years assembling the Global Budget Database: 150 years of primary government budget documents from 20 countries, with 116 identified military spending booms in peace and war. They find that governments almost never cut social spending when they rearm; they expand both…

About VoxTalks Economics

Learn about groundbreaking new research, commentary and policy ideas from the world's leading economists. Presented by Tim Phillips.

VoxTalks Economics is a English tech & science podcast from VoxTalks. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: VoxTalks
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 21 min
Latest episode: 9 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1413723815
Rights: voxeu.org

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