VoxTalks

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 data from forty million mobile devices to investigate why the protests escalated so dramatically.No surprise: partisanship was the strongest predictor of attendance, proximity to Proud Boys chapters and use of the far-right social network Parler also increased participation. But political isolation amplified the movement: the communities most over-represented among those who traveled to Washington were small Republican enclaves surrounded by Democrat-leaning areas, politically and socially cut off from their neighbours. And participation also spiked in counties that experienced a "midnight swing," where the reported vote count favoured Trump on election night before shifting to Biden as mail-in ballots were counted. These were precisely the counties where the "Stop the Steal" narrative landed hardest. The research behind this episode:Sonin, Konstantin, David Van Dijcke, and Austin L. Wright. 2023. "Isolation and Insurrection: How Partisanship and Political Geography Fueled January 6, 2021." CEPR DP18209. To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Konstantin Sonin. 2026. “What triggered January 6?” VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestKonstantin Sonin is the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Born in the Soviet Union, he has spent his career studying how political institutions work under stress, with particular attention to how information and misinformation shape political behaviour, elections, and collective action. He is one of the leading economists working on the political economy of authoritarian and democratic governance, and his research on protest, polarisation, and political geography has made him a central figure in the study of democratic backsliding.Research cited in this episodeRegression discontinuity design is a statistical method used to identify causal effects by exploiting a threshold or cutoff. Sonin, Van Dijcke, and Wright use two regression discontinuity designs: one exploiting the narrow margins by which Trump lost certain states, and one exploiting the gap between the election-night vote tally and the final certified result in individual counties. In both cases, the design allows them to isolate the effect of a specific trigger on protest participation, separating it from the general background of partisan feeling.The "midnight swing" refers to the shift in reported vote tallies that occurred in many counties on election night 2020 as large batches of mail-in ballots were counted. Because mail-in voters skewed heavily Democratic, counties where in-person votes were reported first showed strong Trump leads that reversed overnight as the mail-in totals arrived. For professional observers and election administrators, this pattern was entirely expected; it followed directly from the different rules different states used to count mail-in ballots during the pandemic. For many voters, particularly those already primed to distrust the electoral process, it read as suspicious. The paper finds that communities exposed to larger swings sent disproportionately more participants to Washington on January 6.Network Exposure design is a methodological innovation introduced in this paper. It measures how much exposure a given community had to election-denial signals flowing through its social networks, and distinguishes this from exposure arising simply through geographic proximity to other communities. Isolated communities proved hypersensitive to information traveling through their social networks, but not to information spreading through neighbouring areas. This suggests the amplification mechanism was social, not spatial.Political isolation in this paper refers to being a minority political community within a larger, differently-leaning area. A small Republican-voting enclave inside a Democrat-leaning county or district is politically isolated in this sense. The paper finds that isolation of this kind was a strong amplifier of partisanship in predicting participation. Two other measures of isolation, one based on mobile device travel patterns ("locational isolation") and one based on Facebook connections ("social media isolation"), produce consistent results, suggesting the effect is not an artefact of how isolation is measured.The Proud Boys are a far-right extremist organisation active in the United States. The paper finds that communities with a local Proud Boys chapter were over-represented among those who traveled to Washington on January 6, making proximity to the organisation a robust correlate of participation, independent of general partisan leanings.Parler was a social media platform popular among far-right users in the United States during the period leading up to January 6, 2021. Communities where Parler usage was relatively higher were also over-represented among participants in the March to Save America, suggesting that the platform played a role in amplifying mobilisation signals within the networks most susceptible to them.Collective action theory is the study of how individuals decide to participate in group action, particularly when the costs fall on participants individually but the benefits are shared. Sonin, Van Dijcke, and Wright contribute behavioural evidence on the specific role of political isolation and network-amplified grievance in driving participation.More VoxTalks EconomicsThe Grievance Doctrine What if trade policy wasn't really about trade at all? What if it was about revenge, power, and punishment, tariffs as tantrums and diplomacy as drama? Richard Baldwin on what is driving the US policy agenda. How protests are born, and how they die Every year we see thousands of protest movements on our city streets. Benoît Schmutz-Bloch explains why do some protests persist, and some disappear, and some remain peaceful, but others become violent.

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 do not need a trusted intermediary to spend money, write contracts, or create finance. In the fifth LTI report, published today, Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, Bruno Biais, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni ask how much of that promise has held. Bruno talks to Tim Phillips about blockchain's potential, its flaws, and its future.  It is a Nash equilibrium: if you believe others will follow the rules, it is in your interest to follow them too. On that foundation Bitcoin's ledger has been running continuously for 16 years. Smart contracts, pioneered by Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum, extend the logic to financial agreements. Decentralised finance promised to cut out rent-seeking intermediaries. Cryptocurrencies can step in where banks are broken or currencies have collapsed; in Lebanon, when bank accounts were frozen and payments stopped, businesses switched to crypto and kept operating. But the technology's libertarian origins may need to be sacrificed: As Bruno says, without transparency there is no trust, and transparency in this market may require regulation.The research behind this episode:Amoussou-Guenou, Yackolley, Bruno Biais, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni. 2026. "Can Blockchain Decentralize Money, Contracts, and Finance?" LTI Report 5. CEPR and Long-Term Investors@UniTo. Freely available to download at cepr.org. To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Bruno Biais. 2025. "Can Blockchain Decentralize Money, Contracts, and Finance?" VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestBruno Biais is Professor of Finance at HEC Paris and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). His research spanning financial market microstructure, corporate finance, and the economics of blockchain has made him one of the leading economists working at the intersection of finance and decentralised technology. He has studied blockchain and cryptocurrency markets since their early years, and his theoretical models of consensus mechanisms and cryptocurrency valuation have shaped how economists understand the conditions under which decentralised systems can and cannot sustain themselves.Research cited in this episodeThe blockchain is a distributed ledger maintained by a network of nodes, each holding an identical copy of the record of ownership. When a transaction is submitted, all nodes verify it against the existing ledger and update their copies to reach consensus on the new state. No central authority manages this process; its stability rests entirely on the incentive structure built into the protocol.Nash equilibrium is a concept from game theory, named for the mathematician John Nash, describing a situation in which each participant's strategy is the best response to the strategies of all others; no individual has an incentive to deviate unilaterally. Biais and co-authors identify the Bitcoin protocol as a Nash equilibrium: if you believe others will follow the rules, it is in your own interest to follow them too. That self-reinforcing alignment of incentives, rather than goodwill or central enforcement, is why the blockchain has remained valid since 2009.Smart contracts are lines of code deposited on a blockchain that execute automatically when specified conditions are met: if X, then Y. Vitalik Buterin introduced them through the Ethereum platform, which offers a richer programming language than Bitcoin and allows users to hold collateral on-chain to guarantee the contract will pay out. Smart contracts underpin automated market makers, decentralised lending, and a wide range of financial applications that require no counterparty or intermediary to enforce the agreement.Oracles are third-party services that transmit data about real-world events to a blockchain, allowing smart contracts to respond to things that happen off-chain. A contract that pays out when a house burns, for example, requires an oracle to report that event to the network. Oracles introduce a point of fragility: the authenticity and accuracy of off-chain information must be established before the network accepts it, and that verification is more vulnerable to error and manipulation than the on-chain consensus mechanism itself.Front-running and miner extractable value (MEV) describe the practice by which technically sophisticated actors exploit the public visibility of pending transactions to extract profits at the expense of ordinary users. Because transactions on public blockchains are broadcast to all nodes before they are confirmed, an actor who sees a large pending purchase can execute the same trade first, drive the price up, and then sell at a profit once the original transaction goes through. The cost falls on the smaller trader. Biais notes that the barriers to entry and economies of scale in this activity have concentrated power in the hands of a small, technically skilled group, recreating the kind of intermediary rents that decentralised finance was designed to eliminate.Automated market makers are smart contracts that provide continuous liquidity for trading between two assets by holding reserves of both in a pool and setting prices according to the ratio of the reserves. A large purchase of one asset depletes that side of the pool and raises its price; a large sale depresses it. Automated market makers have become a central mechanism of decentralised finance, replacing the order-book systems used in traditional exchanges.Stablecoins are cryptocurrency tokens designed to maintain a fixed value relative to a conventional currency, typically the US dollar. They are issued by private entities that hold reserves intended to back the peg. Tether, the largest stablecoin by market capitalisation, holds its reserves in a mix of Treasury bills, Bitcoin, and precious metals; in 2021, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tether for misrepresenting those reserves and required it to disclose their composition, making this information publicly available for the first time. Dai is an algorithmically managed stablecoin that maintains its peg through over-collateralisation in cryptocurrency rather than conventional reserves.The Diamond-Dybvig model is a theoretical framework developed by Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig explaining why financial intermediaries that hold illiquid assets while issuing liquid claims are inherently vulnerable to runs. When enough depositors demand withdrawal simultaneously, the institution is forced to sell assets at a loss, making further withdrawals impossible and confirming the fears that triggered the run. Biais applies this logic to stablecoins: if enough holders attempt to redeem simultaneously, the issuer must sell its reserves in volume, driving down their price and potentially breaking the peg.Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are digital tokens issued and managed by central banks, distinct from both commercial bank deposits and private stablecoins. Biais distinguishes two potential use cases: retail CBDCs, which would allow individuals to hold central bank money directly, and wholesale CBDCs, which would facilitate settlement between large financial institutions. He regards the wholesale application as the more promising; a wholesale CBDC could enable fast, low-cost atomic settlement of cross-currency transactions between banks under central bank oversight, a significant improvement on current interbank settlement systems.MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) is the European Union's regulatory framework for crypto-asset service providers, which came fully into force in December 2024. It requires licensing for issuers and service providers operating within the EU and imposes disclosure, reserve, and conduct requirements intended to align the sector more closely with the standards applied in traditional financial markets.Hayek's currency competition refers to the argument by Friedrich Hayek that competition between privately issued currencies would discipline monetary policy: users would switch away from currencies managed irresponsibly, and that threat would encourage better central bank behaviour. Biais applies this argument to cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in countries where the domestic currency has been mismanaged. He cites Nigeria, where sharp depreciation of the naira was accompanied by rising crypto adoption; over the following period, Nigeria's central bank raised interest rates and created a more transparent foreign exchange market. Biais suggests, tentatively, that the competitive pressure from crypto alternatives may have contributed to that improvement.More VoxTalks EconomicsDo stablecoins threaten financial stability? Stablecoins are digital tokens, pegged to a fiat currency. What could possibly go wrong? For one type of stablecoin the answer is: plenty, according to Richard Portes. In coin we trust Crypto investors make a lot of noise, but who are they, and do they behave differently to other retail investors?Do cryptocurrencies matter? Can cryptocurrencies be useful? Not just for crypto bro speculators, but as a shield against the depreciation of the official currency if a government is determined to pursue inflationary policies.

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, Basil Halperin, and Thomas Houlden, have built a growth model that captures what happens when AI starts automating AI research itself. Automation does two things simultaneously: it accelerates research, and it offsets the diminishing returns that have historically stopped self-improving processes from compounding. Three reinforcing feedback loops: software quality, hardware quality, and general technological progress, each amplify the others. Korinek's findings are more optimistic than even the AI labs' own roadmaps, which focus on software capability alone. The research behind this episode:Davidson, Tom, Basil Halperin, Thomas Houlden, and Anton Korinek. 2026. "When Does Automating AI Research Produce Explosive Growth? Feedback Loops in Innovation Networks." Working paper, January 2026.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Anton Korinek. 2026. "When Does Automating AI Research Produce Explosive Growth?" VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestsAnton Korinek is a professor of economics at the University of Virginia. He leads the CEPR Research Policy Network on AI, which is building a community of researchers to understand and anticipate the economic impact of artificial intelligence. He is a member of Anthropic's Economic Advisory Council and was named by Time magazine among the hundred most influential people in AI. His research spanning the economics of transformative AI, growth theory, and the implications of advanced automation for labor markets and inequality has made him one of the most widely cited economists working on these questions. He is also the founder of the Economics of Transformative AI initiative at the University of Virginia, which focuses on the long-run economic consequences of AI systems that approach or exceed human-level capabilities.Visit the CEPR Research Policy Network on AI.Research cited in this episodeDaron Acemoglu's estimate of AI's growth impact. Acemoglu calculated that AI would raise annual growth by approximately 0.07 percentage points, arriving at this figure by multiplying the share of jobs likely to be affected by AI, the fraction of tasks within those jobs that AI could perform, and the productivity gain per task. Korinek argues the estimate was a reasonable description of the AI that existed in 2024 but did not account for the trajectory of capabilities since, nor for the feedback loops between AI progress and further AI development that his own paper models.Recursive self-improvement. The idea that an AI system, once capable enough, could design improved versions of itself, triggering an accelerating cycle of capability gains. The concept was first articulated by John von Neumann in the 1950s and has since become central to debates about transformative AI. All major AI labs, Korinek notes, are working towards some version of this vision; the economic question is whether the resulting growth would be explosive or would be damped by diminishing returns.Semi-endogenous growth models. A class of economic growth models in which long-run growth depends on the scale of the research workforce and the returns to research effort. The canonical insight, associated most closely with Nicholas Bloom and co-authors, is that "ideas get harder to find"; maintaining a given rate of progress requires ever-increasing research investment. Korinek and co-authors use and extend this framework, showing that automation can counteract diminishing returns by replacing human labor with capital in the research process, creating a new feedback loop that was absent from earlier models.Kaldor's balanced growth facts. Nicholas Kaldor's observation, made in the mid-twentieth century, that the major macroeconomic aggregates, including the capital-output ratio, the labor share of income, and the rate of return to capital, remain roughly stable over long periods. Growth economists built their models, including the Solow and Ramsey models, to fit these regularities. Korinek notes that those models were appropriate precisely because they matched the historical data; the question his paper raises is whether the data of the next few decades will look different enough to require a different class of models.Moore's Law. The empirical regularity, observed in computing hardware since the 1960s, that the number of transistors on a chip approximately doubles every two years. Korinek uses chip progress as a calibration benchmark: maintaining that rate of doubling has historically required roughly an eight percent annual increase in the scientific workforce working on chips. This figure allows the model to be parameterised with a real-world measurement of how much additional research input is needed to sustain a given rate of technological progress.Consumer surplus from digital technologies. Korinek raises the problem that GDP statistics are designed to measure market transactions and therefore do not capture the value people derive from digital goods and services beyond what they pay for them. He references research from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab as an example of work attempting to quantify this surplus. The implication for the paper's argument is that explosive AI-driven growth could be underestimated even in the statistics used to monitor it.More VoxTalks Economics episodes"Our Workless Future", an earlier conversation with Anton Korinek from September 2022, in which he set out the case for taking AI's impact on labor markets seriously.Related reading on VoxEUFirms predict an AI productivity boom is coming, a survey of over 5,000 CFOs, CEOs, and executives shows that around 70% of firms actively use AI, particularly younger, more productive firms. They forecast AI will boost productivity by 1.4%, increase output by 0.8%, and cut employment by 0.7% over the next three years.How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe, firm-level evidence on AI's effects in Europe. The authors find that AI adoption increases labour productivity levels by 4% on average in the EU, with no evidence of reduced employment in the short run.From AI investment to GDP growth: An ecosystem view, how the current AI wave is contributing to US GDP, both directly through investment and indirectly through ongoing service flows. 

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 how Russia deployed financial repression in 2022 to survive the largest sanctions package in postwar history. The ruble was in freefall; banning cash withdrawals and forcing exporters to hand over foreign currency revenues stopped the crisis. The measures worked because Russia kept earning export income, and the sanctions never closed that tap. But with government debt in advanced economies now at historic highs, financial repression is no longer confined to authoritarian regimes under siege. It is a path of least resistance for a government that would rather suppress the symptoms of unsustainable debt than carry out the fiscal reforms needed to fix it.The research behind this episode:Itskhoki, Oleg, and Dmitry Mukhin. 2026. "Sanctions, Capital Outflows, and Financial Repression." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim. 2026. "Sanctions, Capital Outflows, and Financial Repression." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues (podcast).Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestsOleg Itskhoki is a professor of economics at Harvard University. His research spanning international macroeconomics, exchange rates, capital flows, and financial frictions has reshaped how economists think about currency crises and the limits of open-economy models. He received the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association in 2022.Research cited in this episodeThe Washington Consensus was the post-Cold War policy framework, closely associated with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that advocated free capital markets and discouraged government intervention in exchange rates or cross-border capital flows. Under this framework, financial repression was considered illegitimate; the goal was a more market-oriented, liberal macroeconomic order. As Itskhoki notes, the consensus has frayed considerably since the 2008 financial crisis, and the IMF now endorses certain forms of capital flow management under specific circumstances, though the broader norm against persistent financial repression remains.Financial repression is any government intervention that distorts the private financial decisions of domestic agents. In its traditional form, it meant forcing the banking sector to hold government debt at below-market returns, crowding out private investment and reducing the fiscal cost of high debt levels. The term covers a wide range of tools: restrictions on cash withdrawals, requirements that exporters convert foreign currency revenues to the central bank, interest rate ceilings, and policies designed to prevent citizens from holding savings in foreign currencies. Itskhoki distinguishes between its use in normal times (which he regards as distortionary and unjustified except as a last resort) and its deployment in emergencies such as financial crises, bank runs, or external sanctions, where it may be the only available stabilising instrument.Capital controls are government restrictions on cross-border capital flows. They are related to but distinct from financial repression: capital controls concern what money can cross borders; financial repression concerns what domestic agents can do with money at home. The two are often deployed together under external pressure.Dollarization describes the tendency of households and businesses in economies with weak or unstable currencies to save and transact in foreign currency, typically US dollars, rather than the domestic currency. Governments often use financial repression to discourage dollarization, restricting access to foreign currency holdings domestically. Itskhoki notes this is one of the many forms the policy takes beyond its traditional debt-management role.Russia's use of financial repression after the 2022 sanctions. Following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Western governments imposed an unprecedented package of financial sanctions, trade restrictions, and asset freezes. The ruble depreciated sharply. Russia's response included a tax on foreign currency purchases, mandatory conversion of exporters' foreign currency revenues to the central bank, and direct restrictions on cash withdrawals from bank accounts. The ruble stabilised and recovered within weeks. Itskhoki argues the measures succeeded in the short term not because financial repression is inherently powerful against sanctions, but because the sanctions failed to close off Russian export income; Russia kept receiving substantial foreign currency from energy sales, reducing the pressure on the tools of repression. The structural gap in the sanctions regime was the failure to curtail Russian export revenues.The "What's Next for Ukraine?" seriesListen to our three-part series based on papers presented at the 1st Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues Conference, Paris, December 2025.Giacomo Anastasia, Tito Boeri, and Oleksandr Zholud: what the data from Ukraine's wartime labour market reveal about employment, displacement, and the economic costs of the war. Also in the series: Maurice Obstfeld and Yuriy Gorodnichenko on financial inflows, integration, and the growth prospects of a westward-facing Ukraine. Also in the series: Edward Glaeser, Martina Kirchberger, and Andrii Parkhomenko on how to rebuild Ukraine's cities, and why the choice of what to reconstruct matters as much as the scale of investment. 

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 Zholud draw on an unprecedented wartime dataset to document how Ukraine's labour market adapted under that pressure. What they find is not what you might expect. Aggregate matching efficiency fell by only about 15%; less than the decline recorded in the United States during the 2008 financial crisis. Firms hired women into roles previously closed to them by law, took on older workers and people with disabilities, and expanded remote work to keep displaced employees and refugees connected to Ukrainian payrolls. The collapse was real, but concentrated: in contested territories near the frontline, employment fell to less than half its pre-war level and vacancy postings dropped to virtually zero. The question the paper poses for reconstruction is how to sustain that resilience, absorb close to a million returning soldiers, and begin to reverse what five years of disrupted schooling has done to a generation.The research behind this episode:Anastasia, Giacomo M., Tito Boeri, and Oleksandr Zholud. 2026. "A Wartime Labor Market: The Case of Ukraine." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues, special issue: "What's Next for Ukraine?"To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim. 2026. "What's Next for Ukraine: A Wartime Labour Market." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues (podcast).Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestsGiacomo Anastasia is a PhD student in Economics at Columbia University and Columbia Business School. His research interests include public economics, labour economics, and industrial organisation.Tito Boeri is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University and one of Europe's leading authorities on labour markets, unemployment insurance, and welfare state reform. He served as President of INPS, Italy's national social security institution, from 2015 to 2019.Oleksandr Zholud is a researcher at the National Bank of Ukraine. He was central to maintaining the economic data systems that continued to function through the war, and which made the empirical work in this paper possible. Research cited in this episodeThe civilian labour force contraction is estimated at roughly twenty to twenty-five per cent of the pre-war workforce in government-controlled areas, equivalent to a loss of around 3.5 million workers. The calculation combines refugees abroad (between six and seven million, of whom approximately seventy per cent are of working age), military mobilisation (at least 800,000 since 2022, up from 250,000 before the war), and combat casualties. The authors note that a shock of this scale has almost no modern precedent; the closest comparisons are Serbia's losses in the First World War and the economic disruption caused by the 1994 Rwandan genocide.Work.ua is the largest online job-search platform in Ukraine, covering around 125,000 firms and 4.5 million workers. The paper draws on weekly data from Work.ua on vacancy postings, job-seeker resumes, and offered and expected wages to track labour market dynamics across sectors and regions throughout the war. This platform data continued to be updated through the conflict and provided the primary source for the paper's matching analysis, replacing the State Statistics Service household survey, which suspended publication after the invasion.The InfoSapiens household survey, commissioned by the National Bank of Ukraine since 2021, serves as the wartime replacement for the State Statistics Service quarterly Labour Force Survey. It interviews around 1,000 individuals per quarter on employment, unemployment, and labour force participation, stratified by gender, age, region, and settlement size. Despite its smaller sample, it remains the primary regular survey-based source on Ukraine's labour market since the full-scale invasion.The State Employment Service (SES) firm survey, conducted in January 2025 in cooperation with Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation, covered 55,000 enterprises employing 4.2 million workers plus 70,000 registered unemployed persons. This cross-sectional survey provided the paper's evidence on how recruitment practices, remote work adoption, and workforce composition changed after the invasion; it is described in the paper as one of the largest wartime enterprise surveys of its kind.Air raid alarm data are used as the paper's proxy for regional exposure to the war. When missiles or drone attacks are detected, sirens activate across affected areas; the authors use the frequency and duration of these alarms to classify Ukrainian regions on a spectrum from low-exposure (western oblasts such as Lviv) to high-exposure (eastern regions such as Kharkiv) to contested (partially or fully occupied territories including parts of Donetsk and Luhansk). This classification is the basis for the paper's finding that war intensity is the primary driver of differences in labour market outcomes across regions.Matching efficiency is a standard labour economics measure of how effectively the market converts a given stock of unemployed workers and open vacancies into new hires. A fall in matching efficiency means that jobs and workers exist but find each other more slowly. The paper estimates that Ukraine's aggregate matching efficiency declined by about fifteen per cent after the invasion; a smaller fall than the more than twenty per cent recorded in the United States during the 2008 financial crisis, though with severe deterioration concentrated in frontline and contested regions, where matching efficiency dropped by close to twenty-five per cent.Remote work as a retention mechanism. A survey of Ukrainian refugees abroad found that roughly forty per cent of those in employment were working for Ukrainian firms remotely. Those maintaining an employment link to a Ukrainian company reported a significantly higher intention to return to Ukraine after the war compared with refugees employed by foreign firms. Anastasia argues this makes remote work not only an economic adaptation but a tool for sustaining the connection between displaced workers and the country they may one day return to rebuild.More in the "What's Next for Ukraine?" seriesThis episode is the third and final in a series based on papers presented at the inaugural Economic Policy winter conference, Paris, December 2025.Episode 1, with Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Maurice Obstfeld: why $40 billion a year in investment is more achievable than it sounds, why deep debt restructuring is a prerequisite for attracting private capital, and what the Euroclear frozen assets could unlock. Episode 2, with Edward Glaeser, Martina Kirchberger, and Andrii Parkhomenko: why the right model for rebuilding Ukraine's cities is postwar Tokyo rather than postwar Berlin or Warsaw, and why directing reconstruction spending towards the most damaged regions would be rebuilding in the wrong direction. Related reading on VoxEUThe labour market in Ukraine: Rebuild better, the companion VoxEU column by Anastasia, Boeri, and Zholud, summarising the paper's findings on matching efficiency, firm adjustment, and the policy priorities for reconstruction. You only live twice: A growth strategy for Ukraine, Gorodnichenko and Obstfeld's companion column to Episode 1, making the case for $40 billion a year in investment and explaining why EU and NATO accession momentum is the key enabling condition.Rebuilding cities in Ukraine, a VoxEU column on the spatial and urban decisions that will shape how Ukraine's cities develop in the decades after the war, and why the Tokyo model of decentralised land readjustment is the right precedent.

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 Soviet economy and never properly adapted for the one that followed. So when reconstruction begins, the question is not simply how to repair what was there: it is whether repairing what was there is the right goal.Edward Glaeser of Harvard, Martina Kirchberger of Trinity College Dublin, and Andrii Parkhomenko of the University of Southern California argue that the most instructive precedent is not post-USSR Warsaw, or postwar Berlin, it is postwar Tokyo. Firebombed into ruin, Tokyo rebuilt in a way that was strikingly decentralised: master plans quickly abandoned, local communities empowered to combine small lots through land readjustment, and figure it out from the bottom up. Before the war, Ukraine's economic activity was already shifting away from heavy industry and the east, towards services and the west. Reconstruction that concentrates investment where the damage is greatest, rather than where people want to build a new life, would repair the buildings and miss the point.The research behind this episode:Glaeser, Edward L., Martina Kirchberger, and Andrii Parkhomenko. 2025. "Rebuilding Ukraine's Cities: Maximizing Benefits and Minimizing Costs." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues, special issue: "What's Next for Ukraine?" To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim. 2026, "What's Next for Ukraine: Reconstruction." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues (podcast). Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestsEdward Glaeser is Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is one of the world's leading urban economists, with a research agenda spanning cities, housing markets, economic growth, and governance.Martina Kirchberger is a CEPR Research Affiliate and Assistant Professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on structural transformation, urban economics, and development in low- and middle-income countries.Andrii Parkhomenko is Assistant Professor of Real Estate at the USC Marshall School of Business and a researcher at the Kyiv School of Economics. His work centers on urban and spatial economics, with a particular focus on housing markets and city growth.Research cited in this episodeUkraine Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, World Bank Group, European Commission, and UN, 2024. The source of the physical damage figure cited in this episode: approximately $175 billion by the end of 2024, with estimates for end-2025 likely exceeding $200 billion. Some independent projections cited by Glaeser run to $500 billion or above.The concept of investing-in-investing, referenced by Kirchberger, originates in work by Paul Collier on how resource-rich developing countries can scale up capital investment effectively. It refers to the prior investments in institutions, skills, and capacity that must be made before large-scale capital flows can be productively absorbed. The implication for Ukraine: there is work to do now, before reconstruction begins at scale.The Tokyo land readjustment model, which Glaeser cited as the most instructive reconstruction precedent, allowed owners of small fragmented lots to pool their land, redevelop it jointly, and receive a share of the new property in exchange for their stake in the old. It enabled large-scale urban reconstruction without central expropriation, and without waiting for government direction. The mechanism remains in active use in Japanese urban planning.The Solidere reconstruction of central Beirut was raised as a cautionary counterexample: a centralised, top-down rebuild that produced a high-end commercial district with questionable benefit to ordinary Lebanese, and which substantially enriched its private shareholders. The contrast with Tokyo's decentralised model is the episode's sharpest illustration of what reconstruction can and cannot achieve when organised from above.More in the "What's Next for Ukraine?" seriesThis episode is the second in a three-part series based on papers presented at the inaugural Economic Policy winter conference, Paris, December 2025.Episode 1: Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Maurice Obstfeld on the investment and financing challenge: $40 billion a year, debt restructuring as a prerequisite for private capital, and why the number is more achievable than it sounds.Episode 3: Demobilisation and the labour market: getting soldiers back into work without breaking the economy that kept the country going. Related reading on VoxEURebuilding cities in Ukraine: A VoxEU column on the urban reconstruction challenge, including the spatial decisions that will shape how Ukraine's cities develop in the decades after the war.A blueprint for the reconstruction of Ukraine: A comprehensive VoxEU overview of the reconstruction architecture: what institutions are needed, how international financing can be coordinated, and what the sequencing of investment should look like.Completing Ukraine's reconstruction architecture: On the remaining gaps in the international framework for financing and coordinating Ukraine's rebuild, and what needs to happen before reconstruction can begin at the required scale.Lessons for rebuilding Ukraine from economic recoveries after natural disasters: What the evidence from post-disaster reconstruction in other countries tells us about what works, what fails, and how quickly economies can return to their pre-shock trajectories.

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 restructuring of Ukraine's war debts – including, for sufficiently large obligations, outright forgiveness – is not just politically defensible but economically essential for attracting private investment. The bill for rebuilding and growing Ukraine, Gorodnichenko estimates, is $40 billion a year: $20 billion to replace destroyed capital, $10 billion to stop Ukraine falling behind its Eastern European peers, and $10 billion to start closing the gap. Put that figure next to what Poland absorbed in FDI during its post-communist transition, or the €200 billion of Russian state assets currently immobilised in Euroclear, or the budgetary support Ukraine has been receiving since 2022 – and it looks achievable. The harder challenge, they argue, is not raising $40 billion. It is directing it: towards investment rather than consumption. Ukraine didn't grow in the post-Soviet era at the rate that its neighbours achieved. EU accession momentum and secure borders can be a signal to investors that this time the trajectory will be different.The research behind this episode:Gorodnichenko, Yuriy, and Maurice Obstfeld. 2026. "You Only Live Twice: Financial Inflows and Growth in a Westward-Facing Ukraine." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues, special issue: "What's Next for Ukraine?"To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim. 2025. "You Only Live Twice: Financial Inflows and Growth in a Westward-Facing Ukraine." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues (podcast).Assign this as extra listening — the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestsYuriy Gorodnichenko is a CEPR Research Fellow and Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he leads CEPR's Ukraine Initiative. His research spans monetary policy, fiscal policy, and the macroeconomics of growth and business cycles.Maurice Obstfeld is a CEPR Distinguished Fellow and Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2015 to 2018, and as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama from 2014 to 2015. He is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Research cited in this episodeThe discussion of debt overhang draws on a body of work from the 1980s developing-country debt crises, notably the insight that for sufficiently indebted countries, debt reduction can increase the expected value of what creditors recover. Gorodnichenko and Obstfeld apply this framework directly to Ukraine's war debts, arguing that deep restructuring – supported by bilateral official creditors, many of whom are European – is a prerequisite for private investment to follow.The €200 billion figure for immobilised Russian central bank assets held at Euroclear is the basis for Obstfeld's proposal of a reparations loan that would give Ukraine immediate access to large-scale resources, with repayment contingent on Russian reparations. This is discussed in more detail in the related reading below.More in the "What's Next for Ukraine?" seriesThis episode is the first in a three-part series based on papers presented at the inaugural Economic Policy winter conference, Paris, December 2025. Episodes 2 and 3, on rebuilding and the labour market, are forthcoming.Related reading on VoxEUYou only live twice: A growth strategy for Ukraine — Gorodnichenko and Obstfeld's own VoxEU column summarising the key arguments in this paper: why $40 billion a year is achievable, what the policy levers are, and why the window matters.Euroclear and the geopolitics of immobilised Russian assets — The legal and financial context behind the €200 billion of Russian central bank assets frozen at Euroclear, and what it would take to use them for a reparations loan to Ukraine.Using the returns of frozen Russian assets to finance the victory of Ukraine — A VoxEU proposal for channelling the interest income generated by frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine's needs, without requiring the more politically contested step of confiscating the assets themselves.Ukraine's recovery challenge — An earlier VoxEU overview of the reconstruction task: the scale of damage, the role of EU accession, and the two-phase approach to restoring growth.

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 to Tim Phillips about when and why voters choose alpha males, and how they respond to being given power.

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 preferred.Simon Quinn of Imperial College London and CEPR and Tom Schwantje of Bocconi University were two of the researchers. They tell Tim Phillips about why it is important to develop better managers, and how we might do that for young professionals.

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 work.In this episode, Tim Phillips talks to Lucie Giorgi, Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE), whose research tracks the impact of sex segregation in French elementary schools; Alishuba Philip of the University of Zurich, who has investigated why slum redevelopment often doesn't benefit the people who live there, and Ali Bakhtawar – also of AMSE – about Lawfare in Pakistan.

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 minimise that damage? Justin Sandefur is well qualified to speak on this topic – he leads Coefficient Giving's programme on economic growth in low- and middle-income countries and is one of the authors in a chapter on this topic in the recent CEPR book, The Economic Consequences of the Second Trump Administration. Tim Phillips asked him about the consequences of the cuts on global health.

Recorded at the CEPR Annual Forum in Paris. Many of the Trump administration policies have direct consequences for Europe. Some of them are directly targeted at Europe. So how should Europe respond? The CEPR Press book The Economic Consequences of the Second Trump Administration covers this in up-to-the-minute detail. In Paris Tim Phillips spoke to two of the editors, Beatrice Weder di Mauro and Ugo Panizza of the Graduate Institute Geneva, president and vice president of CEPR. Both have strong views about the challenge to Europe, and how Europe should meet that challenge.

Recorded at the CEPR Annual Symposium in Paris. As we expect to live longer, what does this mean for the choices we make, and for the economy? What decisions will seniors be making about their later years, and do the opportunities given to them by society reflect their abilities, needs and ambitions? In Paris Tim Phillips caught up with Martin Ellison of University of Oxford and Julian Ashwin of Maastricht University to talk about their work on the macroeconomic impact of longevity.

After Liberation Day, the dollar fell by 6%. We would usually expect tariffs to send exchange rates in the other direction. So what happened?In another episode recorded at the CEPR Annual Symposium in Paris, Giancarlo Corsetti tells Tim Phillips about new research that shows how exchange rates are responding to US tariffs since 2018. When tariffs are expected and retaliation is swift, he argues, then market reactions reflect a repricing of long-run risk, rather than the text-book response we might expect.

In 2025, the trade story was about tariffs. And that story isn't over. Does anyone know what happens next? Richard Baldwin of IMD Business School and CEPR was author of the chapter on tariffs in the CEPR Press book The Economic Consequences of The Second Trump Administration, and also of The Great Trade Hack, published by CEPR press in 2025. Gene Grossman of Princeton and CEPR analysed the legality of the Trump tariffs in a recent CEPR discussion paper.So, at the CEPR Symposium in Paris, Tim Phillips asked both of them: What happens next?Download The Economic Consequences of The Second Trump AdministrationDownload The Great Trade Hack Download Commandeering the Customs (gated link)

Another special episode recorded at the CEPR annual symposium in Paris.When does the level of debt in the US become a problem for the economy, and for ordinary Americans? And when it does, what are the policy options to fix it?That's the topic of a Chapter in the CEPR book. The authors are Ugo Panizza of the Graduate Institute, Geneva and CEPR, and Antonio Fatás of INSEAD and CEPR. They talk to Tim Phillips about how recent policy – notably the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – is blowing up US debt and warn that the administration can't keep kicking the can down the road for ever.

Stablecoins are digital tokens, pegged to a fiat currency. What could possibly go wrong?For one type of stablecoin the answer is: plenty, according to Richard Portes. The founder and honorary president of CEPR is also co-chair of the European Systemic Risk Board Crypto Asset Task Force. In this role he has been investigating the risks of multi-issuer stablecoins in Europe. He tells Tim Phillips that, if one of these stablecoins hit trouble, US holders could use European regulation to recover their investment from the coin's European reserves. And that, he argues, would be a threat to Europe's financial stability.

In another of our special episodes recorded at the CEPR annual Symposium, we ask: is it time for Europe to rearm?The message from the US could not be clearer: it is time for European countries to take care of their own security. If Europe decides to rearm, it has the industrial base – but Moritz Schularick of the Kiel Institute and CEPR warns that it isn't converting that capacity into credible deterrence. Tim Phillips asks him what European rearmament could mean in practice: not just scaling up production but buying smarter and investing in next-generation technologies that can spill over into the wider economy. And is there enough political will to create a European defence architecture that can stand on its own?

In another of our episodes recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium, we ask: When Gen AI can do an undergraduate's problem set in seconds, how should teaching, and the syllabus, respond? Who better to answer this than Wendy Carlin of UCL and CEPR? Wendy – who has recently become Dame Wendy – was at the symposium to talk about her project to change economics teaching through the CORE Project, which more than 500 institutions use to teach introductory economics in a way that flips the standard textbook treatment on it head.Recently Wendy and CORE have been working to harness the power of AI to help students apply their knowledge in unfamiliar settings, to reason and discriminate, to make AI into what she calls “A cognitive sparring partner”. She tells Tim Phillips what that means for the Economics Major, and why that might create economics graduates with the skills that employers value. Try CORE, it's free: https://core-econ.org

Another special episode recorded at the CEPR annual symposium in Paris. The Trump administration says it wants America to lead in AI, but what does that mean in practice for trade and productivity? Will AI make growth great again, or just inflate a short-term capital spending boom?Gary Gensler of MIT and CEPR (also a former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission) unpacks the administration's AI action plan, helps us work out what's happening to export controls, and untangles the deal-making geopolitics of AI hardware. 

At the CEPR annual Symposium in Paris we sat down with Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a distinguished fellow of CEPR, and a global authority on geopolitics and trade to discuss the profound changes in the multilateral order in 2025, how countries will adjust to this new normal – and whether the changes we have seen will ever be unwound.

Who would be a policymaker right now? The list of economic problems that we need to solve ranges from “very difficult” to “existential”. An ambitious new book collects the ideas of many influential economists on how to approach these challenges. But can it avoid the mistakes of previous attempts to find an economic policy consensus? Andrés Velasco and Tim Besley are two of the editors of The London Consensus. Tim Phillips joined them at The London School of Economics to ask why the book was created, how policymakers can use it, and whether we should be wary of economists bearing paradigms. Download The London Consensus. https://www.lse.ac.uk/school-of-public-policy/research/london-consensus

Economic sanctions are the big geoeconomic bazooka. But what does history tell us about how well they work, and their relevance today. And does the theory match the data? Moritz Schularick of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and CEPR talks to Tim Phillips about the evidence of the history of sanctions on what they can achieve, whether we expect too much too soon from small sanctions – and whether politicians are prepared to impose the sanctions that bite.

Biodiversity is essential for the wide range of economic activities that our planet needs. Yet, the economic consequences of its global decline are hard to estimate, because most population studies focus on individual species in isolation. Frederik Noack of the University of British Columbia argues that this misses a central insight about biodiversity: a healthy environment depends not just on individual species, but also on the way they work together to keep our natural environment in balance. One especially important aspect of this is the way that birds help keep crops safe from pests and reduce the need for pesticides. He tells Tim Phillips about the long-term decline of bird populations in the US and the knock-on effect on agriculture, and pollution. 

In 2021, at COP26, the International Accounting Standards Board announced it would create a standard for this reporting. It wants to integrate sustainability reporting with traditional IFRS accounting. Should firms be compelled by regulators to disclose their impact on the climate in their corporate reporting? Investors value convergence in sustainability reporting standards, but they are facing stiff opposition both in the US and Europe – even while developing economies embrace the new regime. Lucrezia Reichlin of the London Business School and CEPR talked to Tim Phillips on the progress to sustainability standards, the scope of reporting, who wants it, and who's objecting to it. 

In Europe and beyond, populist politicians continue to gain ground. What message are voters sending? Are politicians from other parties listening, and explaining their policies in a way that will successfully reach supporters of populist parties? There are one set of policies for which this may be a huge problem soon. What does this mean for that those tricky choices that politicians will have to make when dealing with the consequences of climate change, and sustainability? Sergei Guriev of London Business School and Catherine de Vries of Bocconi University have both examined what is driving support for populism, and the implications of populism in politics for the social contract. They tell Tim Phillips why the planet may have a populism problem.

Our economy is embedded in nature, but nature is in danger. External funding is needed, especially in the Global South, to support the conservation of our natural ecosystems. Markets can play a role, but the way in which voluntary carbon markets do this has low public trust which, from recent news, may be deserved. Estelle Cantillon of Université libre de Bruxelles and CEPR tells Tim Phillips about her proposal for a new market mechanism to channel funds to projects that will conserve or restore our natural environment by paying dividends to those who invest. But how will it avoid greenwashing, and who will buy the shares? Read about this in Chapter 8 of the Paris report: https://cepr.org/system/files/publication-files/257653-policy_insight_145_designing_and_scaling_up_nature_based_markets.pdf

“What is needed is non-marginal, transformative change to shift the economy, technology, and society”. That's the typically forthright recommendation from Rick van der Ploeg of the University of Oxford and University of Amsterdam for how to ensure that climate policy is effective at changing our habits and behaviour. He argues that the gradual changes in habits that current policies target don't go far enough, and that we run the risk of backsliding. But what does this mean in practice? Rick spoke to Tim Phillips about what policies to push, when to push them – and how big the push needs to be.

We are familiar with climate policy to reduce emissions. We know about the policies to adapt to climate change. But can we successfully reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and how do we create policies and incentives to invest in, and take advantage of, those technologies? Ottmar Edenhofer, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and chair of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, talks to Tim Phillips about an aspect of climate policy that is becoming increasingly important. 

"The Economics of Biodiversity” was published by the UK Treasury in 2021. It sets out how economic systems value biodiversity and natural capital, and which policies would preserve and restore nature. The project leader was Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta of the University of Cambridge. In the latest of our special episodes recorded at the first Hoffmann Centre / CEPR / ReCIPE Conference continue, he tells Tim Phillips what he learned from hanging out with ecologists, why we need indicators of economic performance that value nature, and why we should worry about the decline of natural capital.  The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/final-report-the-economics-of-biodiversity-the-dasgupta-review

Can COP 30 get the green transition back on track? It's not a great time for international cooperation right now and, with hindsight, was the period from 2017 to 2022 a “golden moment” the climate transition, and was it an opportunity missed? That's the argument presented by Livio Stracca, Deputy Director General Financial Stability at the European Central Bank, also the chair of NGFS work on climate scenarios. He talks to Tim Phillips about what we can learn from this golden moment, and what can be done this time around to avoid the dangers of what Livio calls “climate agenda fatigue” among both the public and governments. 

In the first of our special episodes from the first Hoffmann Centre / CEPR / ReCIPE Conference, we're discussing what chances there are of significant multilateral agreements being signed at COP 30 and, given that the chances are low, what plan B might be. Beatrice Weder di Mauro of CEPR, Hoffmann Centre and the Geneva Graduate Institute tells Tim Phillips that, if everyone can't agree, then coalitions of the willing – climate or finance clubs that offer incentives for the countries that want to join – can agree their own sustainability policies. But what are those incentives? And who will lead?

A decade ago, the UK voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. It was the culmination of years of partisan arguments over membership. During that time, most newspapers in the UK took strong “leave” or “remain” positions in the stories they wrote. But were they less obviously partisan in their choice of pictures too? Wanyu Chung of University of Birmingham and CEPR was one of a team of researchers that used artificial intelligence to estimate the emotional impact of news images of politicians before and after the Brexit vote. Photo: European Union 2016 - European Parliament

The International Macroeconomic History Online Seminar Series, hosted by CEPR, is turning 100 this month — not years, but episodes. What began as a lockdown experiment has become a global fixture for anyone who believes economics never forgets. In a special edition of VoxTalks Economics, Tim Phillips talks with organisers Nathan Sussman and Rui Esteves of the Geneva Graduate Institute about the moments that shaped the series and what a hundred lessons from history can teach us today. Why does history matter so much to economists? And how can the series help us understand current events?  Nathan's selection The great demographic reversal https://cepr.org/multimedia/imhos-13-great-demographic-reversal-ageing-societies-waning-inequality-and-inflation Monetary and fiscal history of the US https://cepr.org/multimedia/imhos-81-monetary-and-fiscal-history-united-states-1961-2021 The journey of humanity https://cepr.org/multimedia/imhos-37-journey-humanity Rui's selection The Smoot-Hawley trade war https://cepr.org/multimedia/imhos-26-smoot-hawley-trade-war Financial sanctions https://cepr.org/multimedia/imhos-59-financial-sanctions-arsenal-democracy-or-feeble-weapon Industrial policy https://cepr.org/multimedia/imhos-93-panel-industrial-policy-history

In the second of our episodes based on the topics discussed at the conference “Addressing the Risks and Responses to Climate Overshoot”, organised by the AXA Research Fund, CEPR, and Paris School of Economics, Tim Phillips talks to Matthias Kalkuhl of the University of Potsdam about how to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The innovative technologies that might be able to do this in the future need investment now – so one idea is for firms to buy the right to emit carbon now, as long as they commit to remove carbon when mature technology exists. But to administer this, Europe would need a dedicated Carbon Central Bank. Who would be in charge of it, how would it work, and is any politician brave enough to set it up?

In the first of two podcasts recorded at the conference “Addressing the Risks and Responses to Climate Overshoot”, organised by the AXA Research Fund, CEPR, and Paris School of Economics, Tim Phillips talks to Franck Courchamp of the University of Paris-Saclay about an aspect of climate change that is rarely talked about, increasingly important, and very costly. When plants or animals move, or are moved, to a place they don't belong, there is a risk of damage to natural habitats and an economic cost too. So how do we estimate the size of this risk, and what can we do about it? 

It's cultural meme that teenagers in New York and Seoul will have more in common with each other than with their parents. Has where we come from been downgraded as an influence on what we like, or is there still what Thierry Mayer of Sciences Po and CEPR calls “gravity in tastes”?  His research focuses on a very important aspect of this question: regional French food. Is there still a France of butter, and a France of olive oil? And, if there is, can we draw it on a map, or is this now a cultural and social divide, rather than a regional one? Vote for VoxTalks Economics in the 2025 Signal Awards! https://talknorm.al/vote

We are up to our necks in advice about how to innovate in business, how to succeed as a founder, or how to spot a great startup. Blogs, YouTube channels and airport bookshops claim to reveal the secret. And yet, investors and incubators have a very patchy track record in picking winners.  What if there was a better way to spot entrepreneurs who are more likely to succeed? Konrad Stahl of University of Mannheim is one of a team of researchers who have found one indicator of success that dominates all the others. He tells Tim Phillips what it is, and why it matters.

Today generative AI makes it easy to create and distribute convincing fake news stories, pictures, even videos. We've all been hoodwinked – but does that undermine our trust and confidence in the mainstream media? Ruben Durante of National University of Singapore, IPF-ICREA and CEPR is one of the authors of new research that tests how AI-generated misinformation affects our desire for real news. He tells Tim Phillips the good news and bad news for the future of the media's business model.

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, attended by thousands of business and policy VIPs – is one of those events that pops up on the news every year, as we see photos of multinational CEOs shaking hands with world leaders and taking part in panel discussions on the future of the planet. But how valuable is it to the business people who pay hundreds of thousands of Swiss Francs to attend? Does Davos create business value, or might it be a high-profile way for them to ski and party – in the words of a new discussion paper published by CEPR, is it any more than “a boondoggle”? Andreas Fuchs of University of Goettingen is one of the researchers who asked this question. He reveals to Tim Phillips the size of the impact on stock prices and credit ratings. Photo: WEF/swiss-image.ch/Michael Buholzer

The belief that women are in some way inferior to men has been around for centuries. And throughout that time, women have suffered the consequences. Economists have lately been trying to understand more about the origins of gender biased norms, to help create better policies to challenge them. Their work can build on insights from sociology, anthropology and gender studies, but also raises important questions about the roles of men and women in society. So what should policy attempt to change?  Siwan Anderson of Vancouver School of Economics and CEPR talks to Tim Phillips about what we know on these topics – and the most promising directions for future research.

On 4 August, Paul Atkins, the chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, launched “Project Crypto”. The SEC wants to make the US “the crypto capital of the world”. Crypto investors make a lot of noise, but who are they, and do they behave differently to other retail investors? A new CEPR discussion paper called “Do you even crypto, bro?” summarises what a representative sample of US citizens think about crypto investments and highlights the gap in attitudes to risk and investing between crypto holders and the rest of the population. Michael Weber of Purdue University is one of the authors, and he tells Tim Phillips about the beliefs, the politics and the attitude to investment gains that have typified the crypto market so far.

How do criminals choose the weapons they carry, the number of accomplices, the types of business they target? Economists have long argued that decisions to commit economic crimes are strategic, based on a calculation of risk and reward.  The Italian justice system changes the punishment for a crime depending on how it is committed, and so a new analysis of thieves and their crimes, based on data from Milan, tests whether this is really the case. Giovanni Mastrobuoni of the University of Turin, Collegio Carlo Alberto and CEPR is one of the authors of this research. He talks to Tim Phillips about the economics of crime, the problems of collecting data about illegal acts, and Turin's most famous gold heist. 

Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.  The gender wage gap in advanced economies isn't shrinking. What can firms do to eliminate the part of the wage gap that comes from discrimination? The OECD has analysed the data from countries with pay transparency legislation to discover how much of the gender pay gap arises from the different treatment of equally qualified men and women. Stéphane Carcillo tells Tim Phillips what the research had discovered, and what the policy options could be. Read the research: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-role-of-bargaining-and-discrimination-in-the-gender-wage-gap-in-france_1fd68687-en.html

Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.  One of the mysteries for economists and policymakers has been the reluctance of men to take paternity leave, no matter how generous the terms offered to them. In her presentation, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago Booth School mentioned some new research from Japan that is helping to shine a light on this topic, in an innovative and entertaining way. We wanted to know more, and so Tim Phillips asked her about why, when bosses and employees both think it's good to take paternity leave, most don't. and why an anime video might change this situation.  Watch the anime video we discuss: https://talknorm.al/paternity

From our series recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025. How much progress have we made in finding out the source of gender inequality at work? At the Forum, Barbara Petrongolo of the University of Oxford and CEPR gave the keynote lecture on “Questions and challenges for 21st century labour markets”. In conversations with Tim Phillips, she points out that there are still many unanswered questions about the unequal role of women in that labour market, and that recent research often raises as many questions as it answers. If we find those answers, she argues, we can make society not only a fairer place, but unlock economic growth and productivity. Read more:  The Evolution of Gender in the Labor Market https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-gender-labour-market DP16939 Men are from Mars and Women Too: A Bayesian Meta-Analysis of Overconfidence Experiments https://cepr.org/publications/dp16939 Listen more: Our podcast on how Women are from Mars too https://cepr.org/multimedia/women-are-mars-too

Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.  This week, we interview three of the next generation of economists. At the forum, a group of young researchers were presenting their work in the main theatre and at poster sessions during the breaks. Tim Phillips took the opportunity to talk to some of them about their research.  Pelin Ozgul of the University of Maastricht has investigated whether AI can improve training for call centre agents. Nathan Vieira of Aix Marseille University has analysed the efficiency of short-time work interventions in Europe's labour markets. And Deepakshi Singh of the University of Groningen researched female employment in India during droughts – is a rise in employment a story of economic empowerment, or something else?

Are global economic flows collapsing, or are they reorganising? That's one of the intriguing questions asked by a new CEPR publication called The State of Globalisation. It brings together a series of essays on both the changes that are happening in the global economy, and the policies that can respond to these changes. So how should trade policy and industrial strategy adapt when globalization isn't so much retreating as rerouting? Michele Ruta of the International Monetary Fund is one of the editors. He talks to Tim Phillips about the way that firms, policymakers and institutions need to adapt, and the problems of doing that when they face an uncertain future.  Download the book: https://cepr.org/publications/books-and-reports/state-globalisation

Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.  Now that many of us work part or all our week at home, does that mean we want to move to a different area, or a larger house? And what is the effect on housing for those who cannot work from home? Morgane Richard of Stanford has researched how Londoners sought out new homes post-Covid to match their flexible work arrangements. She tells Tim Phillips what her models tell us about the long-run impact of their new working lives on house prices and rents for everyone living in, and on the edge of, the city.

Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025.  Go back six or seven years and working from home was an exception. Bosses discouraged it, contracts didn't mention it, and we didn't have the technology to do it.  Covid changed all that. But since then, how have work patterns changed? Should we believe the press reports that we're all being summoned back to the office, or is remote work now part of our lives – and what does that mean for employers and employees? Steve Davis of the Hoover Institution and SIEPR has been measuring the evolution of flexible working since the pandemic. He spoke to Tim Phillips about the far-off times when little work was done at home, who is taking advantage of the change in the way we work, and who benefited most from the Great Resignation and the changes in hiring and outsourcing that followed it. 

If we focus on the cutting edge of AI implementation, we're also focusing on a small set of technologically advanced countries. How will AI affect work in the rest of the world, what should those countries do to prepare, and how can they make best use of the technology? Giovanni Melina of the IMF is one of the authors of two papers that calculates both the exposure of jobs to AI around the world, and the readiness of those countries to meet the challenge of using AI effectively at work.  He talks to Tim Phillips about the extent of the exposure to AI in emerging markets and developing countries, whether those countries have the infrastructure to implement applications of the technology, and the policies that would be most effective to increase their preparedness.