Podcast appearances and mentions of Tim Phillips

The usual way to measure women's power in politics is to count the seats they hold in parliament. But most women who take part in politics never stand for office. They vote, attend meetings, petition, protest, or try to get the water supply fixed. In this week's VoxDev Talk, Soledad Artiz Prillaman of Stanford talks to Tim Phillips about her new review of the research into non-elite women's participation in politics, written with Peace Medie (University of Bristol).They are not elite women with less money, she argues. They want different things and face different constraints. Social norms can prevent them from achieving the change they want. But in the Global South there is evidence that non-elite women are using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate the norms that hold them back, rather than waiting for those norms to shift first.The research behind this episode:Medie, Peace A., and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 29.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." VoxDev Talks (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestSoledad Artiz Prillaman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and faculty director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab. Her research spans comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus on South Asia and on how and when women gain access to politics, both as citizens and as representatives. She is the author of The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India (Cambridge University Press, 2023).The paper is co-authored with Peace A. Medie, Associate Professor in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work covers gender, security, and politics in Africa, including the campaigns to end violence against women.Research cited in this episodeElite and nonelite women. The paper defines eliteness by access to political power, not by office held or income alone. Elites include elected representatives, but also academics and business executives whose position gives them access to power. Nonelites are those who lack that access. The distinction matters because policy aimed at getting more women into elite positions only helps everyone else if elite and nonelite women want the same things, and the evidence that they do is thin.The income puzzle. At the individual level, income is generally uncorrelated with women's turnout; at the national level, GDP predicts nonelite women's participation only in some places. Women in paid work do participate more, but the driver appears to be the networks and information that come with a job, not the wage.Vote agency. Showing up to vote is not the same as voting freely. Asked whether they would vote for their own preferred party or the one a male gatekeeper preferred, at least half of women in some South Asian settings say they would defer. Work by Sara Khan shows that the women with the least agency are those whose preferences differ most from the men who hold power over them.Varieties of patriarchy. All societies are patriarchal, but patriarchy operates differently across them. In parts of South Asia it takes the form of explicit, socially sanctioned control over where women go and how they vote. In the United States and Europe it shows up earlier, as socialisation, producing large gender gaps in stated political interest. Same underlying force, different mechanics, different policy conclusions.Quotas. More than 100 countries have adopted some form of electoral gender quota, making it the most widespread women's empowerment policy in the world. The evidence on whether quotas help nonelite women is mixed; they raise some women's participation in some places, but in others the effect is null or negative. In India, Prillaman notes campaign material for quota seats that pairs the woman candidate's name with a man's photograph.Collective action. Networks outside the home, through women's groups, microcredit groups, churches, unions or friendship circles, raise women's participation by widening their information and giving them cover against backlash. Prillaman argues that in the Global South women are increasingly using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate norms, rather than waiting for norms to change first.More from VoxDevWhere are the Indian female politicians?, an interview with Lakshmi Iyer on why a woman winning office in India does not lead to more women standing next time.Related reading on VoxDevGrassroots party activism by women promotes equal political participation, in which Tanushree Goyal finds that women politicians in Delhi recruit women activists, narrowing gender gaps in political knowledge and participation.Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, in which Prillaman shows that microcredit groups raise women's political participation in India by building their networks, not their bank balances.

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. For poorer women the machine meant work, in garment factories and in boot and shoe production; they married later, had fewer children, and many never married at all. For wealthier women, who had few acceptable jobs open to them, the hours it saved went into earlier marriage and earlier motherhood. Philipp tells Tim Phillips the story of a machine that had very different impacts in different social classes.The research behind this episode:Ager, Philipp, and Davide Coluccia. 2026. "Liberation Technology? The Impact of the Sewing Machine on Women." CEPR Discussion Paper No. 21496. CEPR Press, Paris and London. CEPR Discussion Papers are gated; CEPR members and subscribing institutions can download the paper at the link.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Philipp Ager. 2026. "Did the Sewing Machine Liberate Women?" VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestsPhilipp Ager is professor of economics at the University of Mannheim, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and an editorial board member at Explorations in Economic History. His research spans the economic history of the United States, technological change, and the long-run effects of crises and disasters; his work on the Great Fire of London of 1666 featured in an earlier episode of VoxTalks Economics.Research and sources cited in this episodeThe Song of the Shirt. Thomas Hood's poem about a destitute seamstress was first published anonymously in Punch in December 1843. Hood based it on the case of Mrs Biddell, a London widow prosecuted after pawning clothes she had been given to sew. Godey's Lady's Book. The most widely read women's magazine in the US at the time crowned the sewing machine "the queen of inventions" in 1860, having calculated that a man's shirt took 20,620 stitches and 14 hours to sew by hand, against an hour and a quarter by machine. Singer and the Sewing Machine: A Capitalist Romance. Ruth Brandon's 1977 biography of Isaac Singer (Google Books) is the source for both Singer quotations read in this episode. .How the Other Half Lives. Jacob Riis, a Danish-born police reporter in New York, published his account of tenement and sweatshop life in 1890 (free at Project Gutenberg). The shirtmaker's testimony read in this episode was given to the State Board of Arbitration during the shirtmakers' strike and reported by Riis in his chapter on the working girls of New York.The household appliance revolution. Philipp contrasts the sewing machine with the washing machines and vacuum cleaners that arrived two generations later, which economists have credited with freeing women to join the workforce; "Engines of Liberation" by Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu, Review of Economic Studies, 2005, covers this topic. The sewing machine saved time in the same way, but in the 1860s far fewer acceptable jobs awaited the women whose time it saved.More VoxTalks Economics episodesThe economic effect of the Great Fire of London. Philipp Ager's previous visit to VoxTalks Economics, with Paul Sharp, on what contemporary records reveal about London's uneven recovery after 1666.Related reading on VoxEUGender norms and the labour market, a VoxEU column on how norms, both internalised and enforced by peers, constrain women's labour market outcomes; the modern counterpart of the stigma that kept married women in Massachusetts out of paid work.

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 of the Banking Initiative at IESE Business School, just published by CEPR as a free download.Will retail central bank digital currencies, tokenised deposits, and stablecoins upset the delicate balance of system that has been running for decades? Stablecoins, for example, do not create money, but they claim the status of money without the institutional guarantee that makes money trustworthy. Three jurisdictions — the US, the EU, and the UK — are each resolving the same underlying contradiction in different ways. None has fully resolved it.The research behind this episode:Niepelt, Dirk, Stephen G. Cecchetti, Hélène Rey, and Xavier Vives. 2026. Digital Money: The Future of Banking 8. London: CEPR Press. Available as a free download from CEPR.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Stephen G. Cecchetti. 2026. “The digital money supply.” VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestStephen Cecchetti is the Rosen Family Chair in International Finance at Brandeis University, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and a Research Associate at the NBER. He was previously Economic Adviser and Head of the Monetary and Economic Department at the Bank for International Settlements, and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His research spanning monetary policy, financial stability, and banking regulation has shaped both academic and policy debate over three decades. He blogs at moneyandbanking.com.Research cited in this episodeWalter Bagehot's lender of last resort doctrine. In Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873), Bagehot argued that a central bank under stress should lend freely against good collateral at a penalty rate. The prescription remains the intellectual foundation for how central banks manage runs and systemic crises. Cecchetti invokes it to make the point that no private substitute for a central bank backstop has ever proved durable, and that the doctrine is now, one hundred and fifty years on, being tested by instruments its author could not have imagined.Monetary uniformity, mobility, and elasticity. The three institutional conditions underpinning general acceptance of money, developed in analysis by the Bank for International Settlements and discussed extensively in the report. Uniformity means a pound is a pound regardless of which bank holds it. Mobility means claims move between users and institutions at low cost and settle with finality. Elasticity means the supply of money can expand when it is under stress. Together they explain why we accept a deposit at face value without doing any analysis of the bank that issued it; and together they identify exactly where new forms of digital money create institutional gaps.Silicon Valley Bank failure, March 2023. SVB's collapse illustrates both the lender of last resort functioning and the limits of no-bailout commitments. Cecchetti notes that SVB's liabilities were still trading at par on the Thursday before its Friday failure because the Federal Reserve stood behind them. He also notes that Circle, the issuer of USDC, held $3.3 billion of its reserves at SVB and was effectively bailed out in the resolution. The episode is one of two occasions in the past twenty years where money market fund-like instruments have been backstopped by the Federal Reserve under stress.Genius Act (United States). Principle-based stablecoin regulation expected to come into effect in the US around 2027. Under its provisions, only stablecoins issued by bank-affiliated issuers will have access to the Federal Reserve; only those will therefore have the institutional backing needed to function as money. Stablecoins issued by non-bank entities will not.Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCA), European Union. The EU framework for crypto assets, which entered into force in 2024. For stablecoins, MiCA requires issuers to hold 30 to 60% of their reserves in bank deposits, with no provision for central bank backing. The stated rationale is to keep deposits within the banking system; Cecchetti notes this creates a different category of vulnerability and leaves the question of what happens under stress unresolved.Bank of England stablecoin proposal (United Kingdom). The Bank of England's approach differs from both US and EU frameworks by explicitly requiring large stablecoin issuers to hold significant reserve deposits at the Bank of England, making them in effect narrow banks with a direct central bank backstop. Cecchetti regards this as the most coherent of the three approaches in terms of institutional logic, though the same fundamental question applies: whether holding to that design under stress would be politically sustainable.Tether and the jurisdictional challenge. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, is registered in El Salvador having previously operated out of the British Virgin Islands. Its tokens are held by users in multiple countries, traded on exchanges in multiple jurisdictions, and backed by US Treasury securities. Cecchetti uses this to illustrate why local regulation, however well-designed, is necessary but not sufficient; effective oversight of instruments that are genuinely global requires international standards and coordination.Fractional reserve banking and the goldsmith model. The institutional structure described in the episode has roots in mid-seventeenth century England, when goldsmiths began issuing more paper receipts than they had gold in their vaults. The goldsmiths became bankers; the paper became money; the vulnerability to runs became a structural feature of private money creation that persists today. Cecchetti uses the history to make the point that while technology changes how we store and transmit information, the underlying architecture of trust in private money is as old as Newtonian physics.More VoxTalks Economics episodesMaking banking safe, Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz. Our financial system is supposed to be more resilient than before the global financial crisis, but that didn't save Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank or First Republic. So what went wrong?Related reading on VoxEUNew coins on the block: Digital currencies and the financial system. The authors of the Barcelona Report warn that “Digital money will be reliable only where sound institutions and robust technology come together.”

This week on End Credits, we've got pitch! Our movie this week combines a love and appreciation for both classical music and classical crime in the new indie thrill Tuner, which you can now see in a theatre near you. And for something completely different, we will take the opportunity to mark some our favourite war movies as a new one also enters theatres.  This Wednesday, June 3, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Tim Phillips will discuss: War Movies Are Hell. This week marks the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, and not coincidentally there's a new movie in theatres that's about the weatherman who provided the forecast for the invasion (it's called Pressure by the way). So in that spirit, we will talk about some our favourite war movies, but with a twist: each of our picks have to be from a different war! From the trenches of the Great War to the deserts of Afghanistan, we will prove again that war movies are... you know. REVIEW: Tuner (2026). It's a story that's been told several times: Down on his luck guy with a special skill finds success in a life of small time crime until things go horribly wrong and he wants out! In Tuner, that's Niki who's extreme hearing sensitivity makes him an excellent piano tuner... and an excellent safe cracker. From Academy Award winning documentarian Daniel Roher (though it's not a documentary), Tuner is being sold as a crime movie with a heart with a talented new leading man at it's centre, but is this new take on an old story pitch perfect, or does it hit a sour note? End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

Could the SpaceX IPO trigger the next great investing frenzy just as markets sit near record highs? Michelle Martin puts the question to Tim Phillips. With investors debating whether the rally can continue, we explore concerns over and a possible pullback. Tim Phillips, Founder of TimTalksMoney, explains why your biggest financial wins may come not from stock picking but from getting your priorities right. From CPF and SRS to investing and emergency funds, discover what matters most at different income levels. Plus, why earning more money doesn't automatically mean building more wealth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 incoming claim is to the hundred million claims that preceded it, going back to 1976. They find that 81% of initial patent claims fall below the patentability threshold; examiners must negotiate that figure down round by round. And they do a pretty good job. But around a third of all abandoned applications contain at least one valid claim the system failed to protect. You don't see patents that aren't awarded, so those errors have, until now, been invisible.The research behind this episode:Matcham, William, and Mark Schankerman. Forthcoming. "Screening Property Rights for Innovation." Econometrica. Available as CEPR Discussion Paper DP18334 (gated). Current version dated January 2026.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Mark Schankerman. 2026. “How “well does patent screening work? VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestMark Schankerman is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where his research spans innovation, intellectual property, and the economics of technology. His work has examined how patent rights shape R&D incentives, the market for technology, and the behaviour of innovative firms, with particular attention to the institutions that govern how property rights are allocated and enforced.Research cited in this episodePrior art. In patent law, prior art is any publicly available knowledge that predates a patent application. Examiners are required to search prior art and reject claims insufficiently distinct from it. The concept defines the outer boundary of what can be granted protection; the closer a claim is to prior art, the weaker the case for granting it.Type I and Type II errors in patent screening. A Type I error occurs when an examiner grants a claim that should have been rejected, typically because it is too similar to prior art. This allows the holder to charge royalties and, in the US context especially, to bring litigation. A Type II error occurs when a valid claim is refused or abandoned, depriving the applicant of protection they deserve and reducing future incentives to innovate. Schankerman argues that Type II error is systematically under-discussed in public debate: you can point to a patent that should not have been granted; you cannot point to the invention that was never protected.Structural model. The paper uses a dynamic structural model, meaning it models the actual institutional rules, incentives, and decision sequences that govern patent prosecution at the USPTO. Structural models allow researchers to run counterfactual experiments, asking what would happen if specific rules or incentives were changed, without running those experiments for real. This is the methodological basis for the paper's policy analysis.Patent distance measure. The paper's key methodological innovation is a quantitative measure of how similar a patent claim is to existing claims, constructed using natural language processing. The algorithm is trained on existing patent documents and compares the textual content of each incoming claim against all prior claims, covering roughly a hundred million filings going back to 1976. This produces a scalar distance figure that can be compared against an estimated patentability threshold.Deadweight loss. The standard economic term for the welfare cost created when prices are raised above competitive levels. In the patent context, a wrongly granted claim allows its holder to charge higher licensing fees than the market would otherwise bear, generating a cost for users without a corresponding social benefit.Request for Continued Examination (RCE). A procedural mechanism in the US patent system that allows applicants to re-open a finally rejected application in exchange for a fee. Unlike the European Patent Office or China's patent system, the USPTO places no hard limit on how many times an applicant can return. Schankerman's counterfactual analysis finds that restricting rounds to one substantially reduces screening costs and discourages strategic padding of claims.Unified Patent Court (UPC). A specialised European court that began operating in June 2023. Its remit covers the enforcement of patent rights across participating EU member states; it does not conduct patentability examinations. Schankerman argues that by reducing the cost of enforcement, the UPC raises the stakes of the upstream screening process: a wrongly granted patent becomes cheaper and easier to assert.Amazon one-click patent. Amazon received a US patent on the one-click online purchasing process. Schankerman uses the case to illustrate the core economic argument: the relevant question is not whether an invention is valuable, but whether patent protection was necessary to induce its development. If the invention would have occurred regardless, the grant creates costs without providing the intended innovation incentive.Intrinsic motivation. The tendency for individuals to pursue a task for its own sake rather than for external rewards. Schankerman's model estimates that USPTO examiners exhibit substantial intrinsic motivation and that this is the primary driver of screening quality. In counterfactual simulations, removing intrinsic motivation causes outcomes to deteriorate markedly; removing the credit-based extrinsic incentive system has a much smaller effect.Padding. Schankerman's term for the strategic behaviour in which patent applicants include claims that are broader than what is strictly novel, hoping some will survive examiner scrutiny and expand the scope of their eventual property right. The paper measures the extent of padding directly from the distance data and confirms it is widespread.More VoxTalks Economics episodesPatent pools for generic drugs, Mark Schankerman talks about how diffusion of new drugs is painfully slow in low-income countries. Do patent pools accelerate the process, and how we could still do a better job of licensing life-saving medicines?Related reading on VoxEUPatent screening, innovation, and welfare, Florian Schuett and Mark Schankerman, 6 Nov 2020. Critics of the patent system claim that patent rights are becoming an impediment to innovation, and an instrument to extract rents through patent litigation. This column develops a framework to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of the current US patent system and the welfare impact of reforms.

In 1993, the World Bank published a report on a remarkable development story.East Asia's post-war growth — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and their neighbours — had lifted millions out of poverty in a generation. The report documented the influence of export subsidies, state-directed credit, land reform, and government-business dialogue. But the bank, constrained by the Washington Consensus of the time, underplayed the industrial policies that were at the heart of this miracle.Nancy Birdsall was head of the department that produced the report. In this week's VoxDev Talk, she looks back, talking to Tim Phillips about whether this stance affected policy in other developing countries.Birdsall tells Tim Phillips how the report came to exist at all — financed by the Japanese government as a deliberate strategy to expose the bank's economists to a success story their prevailing framework couldn't explain. With industrial policy back at the centre of economic debate, Birdsall's new article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives asks whether the bank missed its moment to embed those lessons into its operational work. The research behind this episode:Birdsall, Nancy. 2025. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle: Too Much a Product of Its Time?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 39(4): 127–48. A free download is available at the Center for Global Development.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Nancy Birdsall. 2026. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle." VoxDev Talk (podcast). [Episode URL].Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Nancy BirdsallNancy Birdsall is president emerita of the Center for Global Development, which she co-founded in 2001. She was previously executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank and, before that, director of the Policy Research Department at the World Bank, where she oversaw the department responsible for the East Asian Miracle report. Her research spans development finance, inequality, economic growth and the role of multilateral institutions in the global economy.Research cited in this episodeThe East Asian Miracle (World Bank, 1993). A 400-page study of the economic performance of eight high-performing Asian economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand — covering the period 1965 to 1990. Commissioned with Japanese government funding, the report documented both market fundamentals and a range of active state policies; its handling of industrial policy was carefully hedged to remain within the bounds of what the bank's dominant Washington Consensus framework could accept. The full report is available from the World Bank Open Knowledge Repository.The Washington Consensus. A term coined by economist John Williamson in 1989 to describe the package of macroeconomic and structural reforms — fiscal discipline, trade liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation and market-determined prices — that the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury broadly promoted as the framework for development in the late 1980s and 1990s. The consensus was dominant inside the bank during the period the East Asian Miracle report was written; countries following activist state policies did not fit its categories easily.MITI (Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry). The Japanese government body responsible for coordinating industrial and trade policy during Japan's post-war growth period, including the direction of credit, protection of infant industries and promotion of heavy manufacturing exports. MITI was widely known inside the bank, but its role in Japan's development was not systematically studied or incorporated into the bank's policy advice until the East Asian Miracle report. It was abolished and reorganised as the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in 2001.Performance-based credit subsidies. A mechanism used across several East Asian economies in which exporters could access subsidised credit conditional on demonstrating actual export orders. The conditionality — credit only if you are already performing — was central to why the policy worked: it rewarded productive firms and withdrew support from those that failed to deliver. The East Asian Miracle report described this approach in detail without classifying it as industrial policy.Japan's postal savings system. A government-run savings scheme that channelled household deposits through post offices into state-directed investment, providing below-market returns to savers while funding subsidised credit to targeted sectors. Birdsall notes it as a mechanism worth studying for developing countries seeking to finance industrial support without relying on private capital markets.Indonesia and the airplane sector. The Indonesian government under Suharto sought to develop a domestic aerospace industry, with state subsidies to Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara (IPTN). The World Bank's East Asia regional department, which managed the bank's lending relationship with Indonesia, was concerned that the East Asian Miracle report might be read as endorsing this approach. Their pressure to limit the report's treatment of industrial policy is the episode's opening anecdote — and the source of what is possibly the best line in the show.IDB report on public-private dialogue in Latin America. Birdsall references work by the Inter-American Development Bank on the conditions under which structured dialogue between government bureaucrats and private-sector firms can support industrial policy; she notes that access at the highest levels of government — including the president — appears to be a factor in whether such dialogues produce results. More VoxDev Talks on this topicIndustrial policy for economic development, Dani Rodrik on the evidence for active state roles in directing investment and exports, and the institutional prerequisites for making them work.The future of the World Bank: Why knowledge is power, Penny Goldberg on the bank's role as a producer and broker of development knowledge, and how that function has evolved since the Washington Consensus era.Related reading on VoxDevModern industrial policy: The Asian miracles' blueprint, a VoxDev Talk examining how the principles behind East Asian industrial success — performance conditionality, export orientation, technology learning — can be translated into policy frameworks for today's developing economies.Where are we in the economics of industrial policies?, what three decades of research have established about when and why industrial policy works, and what conditions determine whether government intervention helps or hinders.Implementing industrial policy effectively: Lessons from shipbuilding in China, how policy design and performance conditionality determine whether sector-level support produces lasting productivity gains — the same question at the heart of the East Asian Miracle debate.

This week on End Credits, we get international. The review today comes from Spain, with a universal take of family dynamics that just so happens to be in Spanish in 53 Sundays, which you can now stream on Netflix. Along similar lines, this entire show will be about a language other than English, at least so far as the movies are concerned!  This Wednesday, May 13, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Tim Phillips will discuss: Películas en un idioma distinto al inglés. This roughly translates into "films in a non-English language", which might also be called "international movies" or "foreign language films" depending on who you're talking to. Since this week's selection is in Spanish, we will take the opportunity to talk about other non-English films we enjoy, from serious dramas to silly genre fare, we will travel the world cinema in around 30 minutes before the main review... REVIEW: 53 Sundays (2026). The new Spanish film 53 domingos plays out a conversation that probably happens in many families: What do we do about an aging parent that can't fully be trusted to live on their own any more? Writer and director Cesc Gay stages a chamber dramedy about three siblings trying to answer that question, but really they're more interested in twisting the knife and sticking one of them with the exclusive responsibility for their father. Was 53 Sundays the darkly cynical balm we needed for this past Mother's Day weekend? End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

Wherever Roshaneh Zafar went in Pakistan in the early 1990s, documenting World Bank social development projects, women told her the same thing: the water and sanitation are fine, but what about economic opportunity?Zafar tells Tim Phillips how that question led her to train with Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, and then back to Pakistan to found Kashf Foundation in 1996 — the country's first specialised microfinance institution for women. Thirty years on, Kashf serves more than one million clients, has covered six million lives through micro-health insurance, and has financed over 3,000 low-cost private schools. Zafar describes a model that long ago outgrew its Grameen origins: customised for Pakistan's diversity, run on a partnership rather than a hierarchical footing, and now embracing climate risk, ultra-poor programmes and AI-assisted credit decisions.The episode also confronts the question: Does microfinance actually empower women? Research has questioned whether it makes a difference. Zafar has ten years of longitudinal data that tells a different story, and a view on why the two bodies of evidence are not as contradictory as they appear.Research and references discussed in this episode:Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Cynthia Kinnan. 2015. "The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(1): 22–53.Rana, Annum Ather. 2025. Evidence on the Impact of Microfinance Program on Poverty Reduction and Income Security. Kashf Foundation Focus Note Series, April To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Roshaneh Zafar. 2026. "Roshaneh Zafar on 30 years of microfinance and mindset change in Pakistan." VoxDev Talk (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Roshaneh ZafarRoshaneh Zafar is the founder and managing director of Kashf Foundation, Pakistan's first specialised microfinance institution. A development economist by training, she worked at the World Bank before leaving to found Kashf in 1996 after training under Muhammad Yunus at Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Her work spans microfinance, micro-insurance, women's economic empowerment, low-cost private education and behaviour change communication. Research and context cited in this episodeGrameen Bank and the Grameen model. Founded by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1983, Grameen Bank pioneered group-based lending to poor women without requiring collateral, on the premise that social accountability within borrower groups could substitute for asset security. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Kashf was established as a Grameen replicator but diverged significantly in its approach: hiring women loan officers from the outset, replacing the group hierarchy with a peer partnership model (using the Urdu term baji, meaning sister, for both client and staff), and adapting products for Pakistan's religious, linguistic and cultural diversity.The 2008 microfinance delinquency crisis in Pakistan. Over-indebtedness, predatory lending practices and the absence of a credit information bureau led to a sector-wide delinquency crisis in Pakistan in 2008. Following the crisis, regulators, lenders and the Pakistan Microfinance Network introduced enhanced consumer protection standards and a credit bureau to prevent multiple borrowing. Kashf now limits lending to clients with no more than two active loans from any provider.Banerjee et al. (2015) randomised controlled trial. The paper, a randomised evaluation of a microcredit expansion in Hyderabad, India by Spandana Sphoorty, found no statistically significant effect on women's empowerment, health, education or consumption over an 18-to-24-month follow-up period. It became the most-cited challenge to microfinance's development impact. Zafar's counter-argument turns on time horizon: empowerment, she argues, is a decade-scale process that short-panel RCTs cannot capture. A University of Minnesota longitudinal analysis of ten years of Kashf client data found a statistically significant positive correlation between the number of loans taken and business income, and between savings behaviour and subsequent business investment.Behaviour change communication: theater and television. Kashf has used street theater for thirty years to communicate on topics including child marriage, girls' education, reproductive health and insurance take-up. After Zafar attended a conference session on the impact of telenovelas on gender norms in Brazil and Mexico, the foundation moved into television drama production, covering topics including child sexual abuse, human trafficking and cybercrime. A child sexual abuse drama prompted a legal notice from PEMRA (the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority), which was successfully contested. The dramas are produced with a media and creative team to ensure sensitive handling of difficult subjects.The gender bond and gender sukuk. In 2005, Zafar rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The experience prompted a long-term ambition to connect micro women entrepreneurs to capital markets. Kashf subsequently issued a gender bond listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange, followed by a gender sukuk (Sharia-compliant bond) listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange — the first such instrument linking Pakistani microfinance to international Islamic capital markets.Low-cost private schools. Research by Kashf found that clients, once they had access to income, were moving their children from public to low-cost private schools; teacher absenteeism in private schools was far lower. Further research showed 70% of these schools were run by women. Kashf began financing them; it now supports over 3,000 such schools, with a requirement that girls constitute at least 50% of enrolment.More VoxDev Talks on this topicBreaking down access constraints faced by women: Experimental evidence from Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how removing specific barriers to vocational training take-up shifts economic participation among women in Pakistan — the supply-side complement to Kashf's demand-side model.How safe transport could unlock women's labour force participation in Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how mobility constraints suppress women's economic activity in urban Pakistan, and how subsidised women-only transport services can shift that.Related reading on VoxDevWhat have we learned about microfinance?, a VoxDev article reviewing the evidence base on microfinance impact, including the conditions under which credit does and does not produce lasting change in household welfare.Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, a VoxDev article on evidence that participation in group lending schemes produces political voice and civic engagement even when economic empowerment effects are limited.Empowering women through digital financial services, a VoxDev article on how mobile money and digital accounts give women a private, named financial identity — and what that does to their control over household resources.

Government contractor @WhistlingMike comes forward in this exclusive, no-holds-barred interview about his direct involvement in UAP investigations.As a civilian contractor, he recovered advanced materials, entered Senate Select Committee on Intelligence SCIFs without traditional clearance, and faced verified death threats after coming forward.He details his interactions with AARO, confrontations involving Tim Phillips, the fight against the Invention Secrecy Act, and what he believes the public still isn't being told. This is raw, firsthand testimony from inside the system — a contractor's account of recovered technology, institutional pushback, and the personal cost of truth. A must-listen for anyone following UAP disclosure, government transparency, and whistleblower stories.

In this episode of Trade Links, host Tim Phillips is joined by Aastha Gupta and Scott Livingstone to revisit two major trade stories shaping the global economy: 10 years on from Brexit, and one year after the US “Liberation Day” tariff announcements.The discussion explores how trade relationships have evolved, where economic frictions remain, and why geopolitics is increasingly influencing global commerce. Brexit – Ten Years On1. UK–EU trade has stabilised, but at a lower levelUK goods trade with the EU remains around 10–15% below its pre-Brexit trajectory in volume terms, even though trade values have recovered due to inflation and higher prices.Manufacturing sectors including automotive and chemicals continue to struggle, while food and agriculture recovered after an early shock but remain more volatile.UK services exports have stayed resilient overall, largely thanks to growth in non-EU markets such as the US, masking weaker EU performance.2. Non-tariff barriers remain the biggest drag on tradeAlthough Brexit avoided tariffs, businesses continue to face customs paperwork, rules-of-origin requirements, and border checks.These non-tariff barriers are estimated to create costs equivalent to 7–10% tariffs on goods trade.Smaller exporters have been disproportionately affected, with some firms deciding exporting to the EU is no longer commercially worthwhile.3. Political and economic pressures are encouraging closer alignmentThe UK and EU are increasingly pursuing pragmatic cooperation in areas such as energy, customs data sharing, food standards, and youth mobility.Sectors including agri-food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and electric vehicles could benefit significantly from regulatory alignment.Broader geopolitical pressures — including Russia's aggression and uncertainty around US policy toward Europe — are creating incentives for deeper UK–EU cooperation without full reintegration.One Year After US “Liberation Day” Tariffs1. The tariffs were dramatic politically, but economically less effectiveUS headline tariff rates jumped from roughly 2.5% to over 20%, levels not seen for more than a century.In practice, exemptions, carve-outs, and negotiations reduced the effective tariff burden closer to around 10%.Despite the scale of the announcements, the US goods trade deficit widened rather than narrowed over the following year.2. Tariffs changed behaviour more than outcomesCompanies accelerated imports ahead of tariff implementation before reducing volumes once measures took effect.Firms adapted supply chains through rerouting, exemptions, and alternative sourcing strategies.Businesses increasingly shifted from “just-in-time” supply chains to “just-in-case” inventory models, embedding higher costs into global trade.3. Trade has become a geopolitical weaponCountries responded with bilateral negotiations, retaliatory tariffs, supply-chain diversification, and efforts to avoid provoking Washington.China's restrictions on rare earth exports highlighted the strategic importance of trade choke points and critical supply chains.The panel argues that the world is entering a more fragmented era of globalisation, where resilience and geopolitical alignment increasingly matter more than pure economic efficiency.All details correct at time of recording.For any terms used please refer to this glossary https://www.natwest.com/corporates/insights/markets/glossary.htmlPlease view our full disclaimer here: https://www.natwest.com/corporates/disclaimer.html

More than one in eight people living in the EU today was born in another country. In fourteen of the bloc's largest economies, it is closer to one in six. For ten years, the same team of researchers has asked what happens to those people next: do they find work, close the gap with their native-born neighbours, and build a settled life? The tenth Migration Observatory report is about to be published, and the decade-long picture it paints is not what the political debate might lead you to expect.Tommaso Frattini of the University of Milan, one of the report's editors, joins Tim Phillips to examine what a decade of consistent, comparable data actually reveals about immigrant integration across Europe. Who are Europe's immigrants, and has that changed? Is the employment gap between migrants and natives closing, stable, or widening? And does it matter whether a migrant arrives from inside the EU or out? The politics of migration is often poisonous, but the data tells a different story.The research behind this episodeFrattini, Tommaso, and Anissa Bouchlaghem.  2026. "Immigrant Integration in Europe." Migration Observatory Annual Report, 10th edition. Collegio Carlo Alberto / LdA / CEPR Press. Free download from CEPR Press, forthcoming on 18 May.To cite this episodePhillips, Tim, and Tommaso Frattini. 2026. "Immigration and integration in Europe." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestTommaso Frattini is Professor of Economics at the University of Milan and a member of the CEPR Research Policy Network on the Political Economy of Migration. His research spans labour markets, immigration economics, and the long-run integration of migrant populations in Europe. He is one of the founding editors of the Migration Observatory Annual Report series, now in its tenth year, and a co-author of the Collegio Carlo Alberto / LdA reports that underpin this episode.Research cited in this episodeEuropean Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS). Eurostat, collected annually by national statistical offices and harmonised across EU member states. The EU-LFS is the primary source for the Migration Observatory's comparative analysis of employment outcomes across countries and over time. The figures cited in this episode are drawn from the 2024 edition, the most recent available at the time of publication.The employment gap. A measure of labour market integration defined as the percentage-point difference in the probability of being employed between migrants and native-born residents of the same country. A gap of zero would indicate full employment parity. The Migration Observatory computes the gap both raw and adjusted for observable characteristics such as age, education, and gender; the adjusted figure isolates the portion of the gap that cannot be explained by differences in workforce composition between the two groups.Migration Observatory Annual Report series. Published annually since 2016 by the Collegio Carlo Alberto and the LdA (Laboratorio di Economia Applicata), in partnership with CEPR. Each edition uses the EU-LFS to benchmark migrant labour market outcomes against those of natives across EU member states. The tenth edition, published in 2026, is the first to offer a consistent decade-long comparison across the full series.The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. Agreed by EU member states in 2024, the Pact is the EU's most significant attempt to harmonise migration and asylum policy across member states. Frattini describes it as a step forward on harmonisation; he also notes that European policy continues to prioritise border control over integration, a balance he argues the data does not support.More VoxTalks Economics episodesImmigration and Public Goods (June 2023). Do immigrants put pressure on local schools, hospitals, and public finances? Research from the United States tests the most common fears directly. The findings have only become more relevant since the episode aired.

Passive income goes head-to-head as ETF investing battles dividend growth investing in a lively showdown, as we ask which investing style might be best suited to be the main pillar for anyone's portfolio? Tim Phillips argues for the long-term power of ETFs, while Willie Keng makes the case for intelligent dividend investing.The debate dives into whether ETFs are still good diversifiers given market concentration, why dividend investing may not just be for retirees, and what really grows wealth over time. There’s also an unexpected “easter egg” in the episode, as both guests reveal a powerful investing moment from their own journeys. Hosted by Michelle Martin with guests Tim Phillips, Founder, TimTalksMoney (https://www.timtalksmoney.com) and Willie Keng, Founder, Dividend Titan. (https://www.dividendtitan.com)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Between 1959 and 1961, between thirty and forty million people starved to death in China. The Great Famine had many causes, and one of them was a campaign to eradicate sparrows.Shaoda Wang of the University of Chicago tells Tim Phillips about Mao Zedong's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which led to the mass killing of sparrows, set off a chain of consequences that scientists had warned about, but political pressure had silenced. Sparrows eat crops, but they also eat the locusts and other insects that destroy the crops. Remove the sparrows and the pests go unchecked. Wang and his co-authors estimate the eradication cut national grain yields by 8-9%, accounting for roughly a fifth of the total agricultural decline during the famine.The research behind this episode:Frank, Eyal G., Qinyun Wang, Shaoda Wang, Xuebin Wang, and Yang You. 2024. "Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China." NBER Working Paper 34087.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Shaoda Wang. 2025. "How killing sparrows contributed to the Great Chinese Famine.” VoxDev Talk (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Shaoda WangShaoda Wang is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. His research spans environmental economics, political economy and development, with a focus on how state capacity and political incentives shape environmental and health outcomes in China and other developing countries.Research cited in this episodeThe Four Pests Campaign (1958). Launched as part of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, the campaign targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows were included on the grounds that they ate grain and reduced agricultural yields. Several prominent Chinese scientists warned at the time that removing sparrows would destabilise the food chain by eliminating a key predator of crop pests, particularly locusts. Their advice was ignored. The campaign resulted in the killing of an estimated two billion sparrows.County gazetteers as a data source. Official harvest data reported by local governments to the central government during the Great Leap Forward was heavily inflated; local officials faced strong political incentives to overstate output, and those exaggerated figures contributed to the famine by masking food shortages from central planners. Wang and his co-authors instead use county gazetteers: records compiled by local elites through a bottom-up process with no link to the political reward structures that distorted official reporting. Comparison between the two sources reveals the scale of over-reporting in the official data.Sparrow habitat suitability index. Rather than relying on reported sparrow kill counts, which were distorted by local officials seeking to demonstrate compliance with campaign targets, the paper constructs an index of how suitable each county's climate and ecological conditions are for sparrow habitation. Counties with high sparrow suitability were more exposed to the shock of eradication; comparing their crop yield and mortality trajectories against low-suitability counties before and after the campaign provides the causal identification strategy. The two groups followed similar trajectories before the campaign; divergence afterwards is attributed to the eradication.State food procurement as a famine amplifier. The Great Famine was not simply a production shortfall. The central government continued to export food during the famine years because inflated harvest reports gave it no signal of the actual crisis. State procurement quotas extracted grain from rural communities at a time when households were already facing starvation; the political system that caused the sparrow eradication was also the mechanism that amplified its consequences.More VoxDev Talks on this topicThe economics of ecosystems: How nature and economies interact. Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago — a co-author of the sparrows paper — on how to measure the economic value of biodiversity. His research on bats and white-nose syndrome, and on desert locusts, shows what happens when natural pest control collapses; the sparrows episode is the historical counterpart.Related reading on VoxDevThe political economy of policy learning: Evidence from China, a VoxDev article on how misaligned incentives across China's political hierarchy distort policy experimentation and produce systematically exaggerated signals — the same dynamic that inflated both the sparrow kill counts and the harvest figures during the Great Leap Forward.Autocratic rule and social capital: Evidence from Imperial China, a VoxDev article on the long-run effects of political persecution under autocratic rule in China, and how the suppression of dissent shapes economic and social behaviour across generations.The economics of conservation in low- and middle-income countries, a VoxDev article surveying the evidence on maintaining natural ecosystems, the role of governance, and the costs of losing species whose economic value is not yet understood.

Content note: this episode discusses assisted dying, end-of-life choices, and suicide. Some listeners may find the content distressing.In April 2024, Daniel Kahneman — one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century — emailed his close friends to say goodbye. He was 90 years old, his kidneys were failing, his mental lapses were increasing, and he had decided it was time to go. He flew to Switzerland to end his life at an assisted dying clinic there, because New York, where he lived, did not permit it. Thirteen American states currently allow medical assistance in dying; most require a terminal diagnosis with death expected within six months. Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland allow it on broader terms. The UK introduced a bill to parliament, but it failed to pass. The debate on whether we have the right to end our own lives has not been resolved. This week Tim Phillips talks to Al Roth of Stanford University about how economics can contribute to the debate on medical aid in dying (MAID). Roth, a Nobel Prize laureate, has written a new book that argues this, and similar debates, often miss the key insight: the binary choice of “allow” versus “ban” rarely reflects reality. For example, in the United States, he explains that physicians in jurisdictions where assisted dying is illegal are familiar with the practice of administering doses of drugs that will relieve pain, but also end life. Roth's argument is not that assisted dying is always right. It is that a moral position that ignores the costs of a ban is not more ethical — it is less honest. Economists, he says, bring one specific thing to this debate: the insistence that trade-offs be made explicit.The book discussed in this episode:Roth, Alvin E. 2026. Moral Economics: What Controversial Transactions Reveal about How Markets Work. Basic Books. Published 21 May 2026.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Alvin Roth. 2026. “The right to choose to die." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestAlvin Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012, shared with Lloyd Shapley, for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. He is one of the architects of modern matching market design, having redesigned the systems used in the United States to match medical residents to hospitals and students to schools. A previous book, Who Gets What — and Why, was published in 2014. Research cited in this episodeRepugnant transactions is Alvin Roth's term for a class of transactions that are controversial not because no one wants to engage in them — that would be disgust — but because some people do want to engage in them and others believe they should not be allowed to, typically on moral or religious grounds. The key feature is that the objectors suffer no direct externality from the transaction; their objection is to the thing happening at all, regardless of whether it affects them. Roth's examples across the book include medical aid in dying, kidney sales, paid blood plasma donation, surrogacy, and access to certain drugs. The policy implication is that repugnant transactions, unlike ordinary market failures, cannot be resolved by standard economic tools; they require explicit engagement with the moral contest and careful mechanism design to decide what is permitted, to whom, under what conditions.Oregon's Death with Dignity Act (1997) was the first US state law permitting physician-assisted dying. It requires a terminal diagnosis with death expected within six months, confirmation from two physicians, a waiting period, and self-administration of the medication by the patient. According to the 2024 report of the Oregon Health Authority, assisted dying accounts for roughly 0.9% of all deaths in Oregon; many patients who obtain a prescription never use it. Oregon's 27 years of data make it the most-studied model for the policy, and its take-up rates and population demographics have informed both advocates and critics in other jurisdictions.Ezekiel Emanuel and vulnerable populations: A 2016 paper by physician and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel and co-authors examined the demographics of patients who access assisted dying in jurisdictions where it is legal and found no evidence that vulnerable populations — defined by disability, age, mental illness, or socioeconomic status — accessed it at higher rates than the broader population of dying patients. Roth cites this as evidence against the argument that legalisation creates pressure on the vulnerable to choose death, while noting that this population-level finding does not rule out individual cases of pressure.The Hippocratic Oath is the earliest recorded professional commitment by physicians not to participate in assisted dying. Roth notes that Hippocrates formulated the oath in the fifth century CE, and that the very inclusion of a prohibition on helping patients die implies the practice was already occurring — physicians were being asked to do it. The religious objection — that decisions about life and death belong to God — and the medical objection — that a physician's role is to save life, not end it — have both been consistent features of opposition to assisted dying across more than two millennia.The Canadian Supreme Court decision (Carter v. Canada, 2015) struck down Canada's criminal prohibition on physician-assisted dying on the grounds that it infringed Canadians' constitutional rights to life and to security of the person. The court's reasoning included the counterintuitive argument that denying access to assisted dying could cause people to end their lives earlier and less safely — while still capable of doing so — out of fear of being unable to later. The Canadian framework that followed is more permissive than US state laws: it does not require a terminal diagnosis but instead an irremediable condition causing intolerable suffering. Canada has since debated, and repeatedly delayed, extending the framework to mental illness as a sole underlying condition.Mechanism design is the field of economics concerned with designing rules, institutions, and processes to achieve desired outcomes, particularly in settings where participants have private information or conflicting interests. Roth is one of its leading practitioners. In the context of assisted dying, mechanism design asks: who can apply, through what process, verified by whom, with what waiting periods, and with what safeguards against coercion or mistaken diagnosis? The differences between Oregon's model (terminal diagnosis, self-administration, annual reporting), Canada's model (irremediable suffering, physician or nurse practitioner administration permitted), and Switzerland's model (available to non-residents) are, in Roth's framing, different mechanism designs with measurably different outcomes.More VoxTalks Economics episodesIn February, Tim spoke to Martin Ellison and Julian Ashwin about what decisions seniors will take about their later years and whether policy can accommodate both their abilities and their needs. Listen to The Economic Consequences of Living Longer. 

In this episode, we have the chance to talk with Tim Phillips, the former Director of AARO. Tim was really honest about how he had zero interest in UAPs or UFOs before stepping into the role. He didn't come in as a believer or a skeptic — just someone doing the job. He opened up about what it was actually like running AARO, the behind-the-scenes process, and how the U.S. political system makes it incredibly difficult to get anything done in a timely way.We talk about his new role as IMIX Senior Strategic Advisor, where he's now part of a major global initiative, bringing together some of the world's top scientists, researchers, and intelligence professionals. It was fascinating hearing about this shift toward real international collaboration. (Team Work To Make The Dream Work!) One of the biggest takeaways for us was Tim's strong belief that UAP research — especially anything involving non-human intelligence — should belong to the public, not locked away by governments.We covered a much-needed look inside the DOD and UAP research in this one. If you want the inside perspective on how AARO actually operated, the frustrations, the realities, and where things might be heading next, this episode is a must-listen for 2026. Let us know what your thoughts are in the comments! Available now on YouTube + all podcast platforms.#UAP #AARO #TimPhillips #UFO #IMIX

Decades of agricultural development policy have chased yield. Bigger harvests, better seeds, more fertiliser. But how can we make farming more profitable? Craig McIntosh of UC San Diego is academic lead on a J-PAL Policy Insight covering twenty-three randomised evaluations of credit and grants for farmers in low- and middle-income countries. He tell Tim Phillips that although yields and revenues often rise, profit rarely responds in the same way. When farmers are already running their farms close to the margin, costs rise at the same rate as income, and the household bank balance does not move much. What can we bundle with credit to change that situation?The research behind this episode:Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). 2026. "Can relaxing credit constraints boost farmers' profits?” J-PAL Policy Insights. Last modified February 2026. Academic leads: Craig McIntosh and Tavneet Suri; insight authors: Leonie Rauls and Rebecca Toole.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Craig McIntosh. 2026. “Boosting farmers' profits?" VoxDev Talks (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestCraig McIntosh is Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. His research spans development finance, agricultural credit, cash transfer design and the evaluation of large-scale anti-poverty interventions. Research cited in this episodeMicrocredit take-up among farmers. Across four randomised evaluations of traditional microcredit aimed at farmers, in Morocco, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Malawi, take-up sat between 13 and 33 percent. Standard microcredit repayment begins a week or two after disbursement, which is incompatible with a crop cycle that pays out cash once or twice a year. Group liability also breaks down in agriculture, where shocks like drought or floods hit borrowers together rather than one at a time.Tailoring credit to the agricultural cycle. Restructured loans push take-up much higher. Nakano and Magezi in Tanzania allowed rice farmers to defer 80 percent of repayment until harvest; 39 percent borrowed and over 92 percent repaid. William Jack and co-authors in Kenya offered dairy farmers asset-collateralised loans for a water tank; take-up reached 44 percent against 2.4 percent for a typical joint-liability product. Lambon-Quayefio, Manjeer and Udry in Ghana offered digital credit with a three-month grace period; 59 percent of farmers took it up.Sell low, buy high. Burke and co-authors in Kenya showed that smallholders routinely sell at the post-harvest price trough and buy back grain at hungry-season prices 20 to 40 percent higher. Harvest-time loans that allowed farmers to delay sales had take-up of 64 percent and produced returns around 29 percent for borrowers. Treated villages also saw flatter price trajectories, generating spillover benefits for non-borrowers.Lean-season credit. Fink, Jack and Masiye in Zambia found that lean-season loans let farmers stop hiring out their labour and instead work their own land. Output rose by 9 percent. Loan repayments were comparable to the gain, leaving farmers roughly even on profits.Selection into credit markets. Beaman, Karlan, Thuysbaert and Udry in Mali first offered loans, then offered grants to those who had refused. Returns to capital among would-be borrowers were on the order of 130 percent. Returns among those who had refused the loan were close to zero. Credit appears to self-target toward farmers who can use it productively, which is regressive in welfare terms and also exactly what a capital-scarce economy needs credit markets to do.Input subsidy programmes (ISPs). Jayne and co-authors reviewed eighty studies of fertiliser subsidies across sub-Saharan Africa. Yields rise while subsidies are in place; profitability is mixed; targeting is frequently politically distorted, often skewed toward better-connected or wealthier farmers. The standout randomised exception is Carter, Laajaj and Yang in Mozambique, where two-thirds of recipients had never used fertiliser before; the programme produced sustained gains and a high benefit-cost ratio. By contrast, Gignoux and co-authors in Haiti found a fertiliser-voucher subsidy crowded out farmers' own input spending and lowered yields once the subsidy ended.Cash transfers and diversification. In six studies measuring both farm and non-farm outcomes, three found households doubled down on agriculture and three saw movement into non-farm enterprises. The Zambian Child Grant evaluation by Handa and co-authors saw women invest in seeds, fertiliser and livestock and start non-farm businesses, with household income roughly doubling.Bundled input programmes. Four randomised evaluations bundled credit or a grant with information, training or market access. All four lifted revenues; three of the four lifted incomes or profits. Harou and co-authors in Tanzania showed that fertiliser vouchers alone and soil testing alone did nothing; only the combination raised yields and revenues. Ashraf, Gine and Karlan's Kenya study on French-bean and baby-corn export found credit increased programme participation from 27 to 41 percent, even where it did not further raise income among participants.

The standard story of American innovation features Silicon Valley, venture capital, and the heroic startup founder.When you trace the history of the internet, GPS, mass-produced penicillin, or the COVID vaccine, the starting point is not a term sheet but a government grant. How much does this matter,  and can we measure it?Tim Phillips speaks to Paolo Surico of London Business School and CEPR who, working with Andrea Gazzani, Joseba Martinez, and Filippo Natoli, has built the first systematic empirical account of how government-funded innovation has shaped US productivity since the Second World War. The headline result: government-funded patents account for roughly 2% of all patents filed in the post-war period, but explain around 20% of medium-term fluctuations in total factor productivity and GDP growth. The return on every dollar of public R&D is more than double the return on every dollar of private R&D. The key mechanism is not that government crowds out private investment; it crowds it in. For every dollar of public research, roughly another dollar of private investment follows, as talent from universities and research institutes moves into startups that commercialise what the public sector seeded. The logic is high-risk, high-reward: the government takes on the uncertainty and fixed costs that the private sector will not bear, accepting a large number of failures in order to find the breakthroughs that private capital would never have funded. The model is now under pressure: 2025 brought the largest cuts to US federal science funding in the post-war period. AI adds a further complication: for the first time, a general-purpose technology is being driven primarily by private capital, and that capital is now pulling the best scientific talent out of research institutes and universities and into industry. If that shift becomes permanent, the direction of innovation will be shaped by profitability rather than by broad productivity and living standards. The paper discussed in this episode:Gazzani, Andrea, Joseba Martinez, Filippo Natoli, and Paolo Surico. 2026. "The Public Origins of American Innovation." CEPR Discussion Paper DP20788. Centre for Economic Policy Research. [gated]To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Paolo Surico. 2026. "The Public Origins of American Innovation." VoxTalks Economics (podcast/video).  Assign this as extra viewing. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestPaolo Surico is Professor of Economics at London Business School and a Research Fellow of CEPR. [verify URL before publishing] His research focuses on macroeconomics, monetary policy, and the economics of innovation and growth. He has advised central banks and governments on macroeconomic policy and is one of the leading empirical macroeconomists working on the aggregate effects of technology and public investment.Research cited in this episodeScience: The Endless Frontier (Vannevar Bush, 1945) is the report commissioned by President Roosevelt as the Second World War was ending. Bush, Roosevelt's chief scientific advisor, was asked to distil what the wartime mobilisation of research had taught, and how it could be translated into a peacetime innovation ecosystem. The report identified three pillars: government, to set the direction of innovation by funding areas of strategic importance; research institutes and universities, to push the frontier of knowledge without the constraint of commercial goals; and the private sector, to transform new knowledge into new products. The framework became the organisational blueprint for post-war American science and, Surico argues, is the institutional foundation of American technological and economic leadership. The report is in the public domain and available online.The NIH and NSF are the two federal agencies whose funded innovations show the strongest subsequent links to productivity growth in the paper's results. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) funds health and biomedical research; the NSF (National Science Foundation) funds basic research across science and engineering. Both are predominantly funders of university and research-institute work — which is, Surico argues, precisely why their output generates larger productivity gains than defence-funded innovation. The result is not that health research is inherently more productive than defence research; it is that both the NIH and NSF fund more basic, frontier-pushing work, and that basic research generates the largest spillovers regardless of the department that pays for it.Crowding in versus crowding out is the central empirical question in the public R&D literature. Crowding out would mean that government spending on research displaces private spending that would have happened anyway, leaving total innovation roughly unchanged. Crowding in means the opposite: public research creates opportunities and trains talent that then attracts additional private investment. The paper finds consistent evidence of crowding in, particularly when government funds flow to universities and research institutes. For every dollar of public R&D, roughly another dollar of private investment follows, typically as researchers from publicly funded institutions move into startups to commercialise what they developed. This is why the aggregate return on public R&D is more than double the return on private R&D, even though government-funded patents are only two percent of the total.The Solyndra and Tesla parallel is used to illustrate why anecdote-based arguments about public R&D are unreliable. Solyndra — a solar energy company that received a US government loan guarantee and then failed spectacularly — is a frequently cited example of government waste in innovation funding. Tesla received a loan guarantee in the same round of funding and became one of the most valuable companies in history. Surico's broader point is that the government's logic for innovation investment is high-risk, high-reward: it should expect and accept a large number of failures, because the gains from the successes — when they are large enough — more than compensate for the losses. Evaluating public R&D by its failures misses this; evaluating it by its headline successes also misses it. Systematic analysis across the whole portfolio is required.Philippe Aghion's Nobel Prize lecture is cited by Surico on the relationship between innovation, competition, and market structure. Aghion, who shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018, developed Schumpeterian growth theory — the idea that economic growth is driven by creative destruction, with new entrants displacing incumbents through innovation. The key implication Surico draws on is that incumbents have a structural incentive not to innovate disruptively, because doing so would destroy the market position they already hold. Startups, which have no existing position to protect, are the natural vehicle for disruptive innovation. This is why the paper finds that government-funded startups generate larger macroeconomic impacts than government-funded incumbents: startups have both the mandate from public funding and the commercial incentive to take market share.DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the US defence department's high-risk research arm, responsible for funding some of the most consequential technologies of the post-war era, including early internet infrastructure. Surico mentions a less celebrated DARPA project — an attempt to embed microchips into bags for tracking, before drone technology made the approach obsolete — as an example of a genuine failure. It illustrates the high failure rate that comes with high-risk public R&D, and the importance of evaluating the portfolio rather than individual projects.The Draghi report on European competitiveness is cited by Surico as a potential catalyst for a different model of European public investment in innovation. Europe's problem, in his analysis, is not the level of public spending but its composition: too much goes to procurement and too little to basic research and later-stage startup support. Europe has the talent, the research institutes, and the early-stage startups. What it consistently lacks is the capacity to fund the scaling-up phase, which causes European innovations and innovators to be commercialised in the United States. A reallocation of spending toward public R&D that acts as a venture catalyst for later-stage startups — analogous to what Vannevar Bush's framework did for the US after 1945 — is what Surico believes the Draghi report could enable, if acted on.

In 2017, Argentina had the highest corporate income tax rate in Latin America. Reducing it was politically popular and economically desirable. Getting it through a Congress where the governing coalition held just 19% of Senate seats, while the fiscal deficit ran at close to 8% of GDP, was a harder problem. A package of reforms was planned, revenue-neutral and phased over five years: corporate tax on reinvested profits would fall from 35% to 25%; a minimum-wage deduction would reduce the payroll tax burden on firms employing informal workers; energy, alcohol, and sugar taxes would be reorganised on rational, emissions-based principles; and provincial governments would agree to phase out the cascading "ingresos brutos" sales tax in exchange for limits on public spending. In this week's VoxDev Talk, Sebastian Galiani, who served as Deputy Minister of Economy in Argentina and led the design of the reform, tells Tim Phillips how the Macri government attempted to reform its tax structure, and what it teaches us about policy. Credibility, he says, was the biggest constraint: in a country as economically volatile as Argentina, what matters is not only what the law says, but whether investors believe it will survive a change of government.The research behind this episode:Afonso, Santiago, and Sebastian Galiani. 2025. "Motives and Constraints in the Implementation of Argentina's 2017 Tax Reform." NBER Working Paper 34442.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Sebastian Galiani. 2026. "Argentina's 2017 tax reform." VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestSebastian Galiani is the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. His research spanning political economy, public finance, and Latin American development has examined how institutions, property rights, and fiscal policy shape economic outcomes. He served as Deputy Minister of Economy in Argentina in 2017, where he led the design of the tax reform he examines in this episode.Research cited in this episodeIngresos brutos is a cascading sales tax levied by Argentina's provincial governments, applied each time a good changes hands along the supply chain. Unlike a value-added tax, it allows no deduction for taxes already paid at earlier stages; the burden compounds with the length of the production chain, making it particularly punishing for manufactured goods that pass through many hands. Galiani's team negotiated a deal under which the provinces agreed to phase this system out over five years and move toward a simpler, less distortive sales tax structure.Second-best reform is the practice of improving a policy system as far as constraints allow rather than designing for the theoretically optimal outcome that cannot be achieved in practice. Galiani frames the 2017 reform explicitly in these terms: the design team mapped the distance between Argentina's actual tax system and optimal taxation, then asked how far they could move in that direction given the fiscal, political, and negotiating constraints they faced. The result departed from the ideal in every dimension; it was nonetheless a genuine improvement on what existed before.Escape clauses are provisions written into legislation that suspend or modify specific commitments if defined trigger conditions are met. The 2017 reform included several: the inflation adjustment for the calculation of corporate assets, for example, would apply only if inflation continued to fall. Galiani describes escape clauses as essential when designing policy in high-volatility environments where external shocks are not exceptional events but a predictable feature of the landscape.Related reading on VoxDevHow should economic researchers give policy advice? Stefan Dercon argues that giving second-best advice, taking into account what is politically achievable rather than what is theoretically optimal, often produces better outcomes than the standard model of advocating for the ideal and waiting.How progressive taxation affects tax compliance in developing countries. Reforms that boost progressivity and are effectively communicated can yield higher compliance alongside greater fairness; evidence that the design and communication of a reform matter as much as its content.Improving payroll-tax compliance through decentralised monitoring: Evidence from Mexico. Evidence that even formal firms evade payroll taxes, and that giving workers the right incentives to monitor their employers' wage reporting can substantially improve compliance; relevant context for Argentina's effort to reduce the payroll tax burden on unskilled workers.

At the start of every planting season, smallholder farmers needs seeds and fertiliser, but the income from the harvest that would pay for them is many months away. With no credit history and no collateral, banks aren't going to give credit to farmers.They cope by selling livestock, pledging part of the harvest to a trader at a discount, or turning to neighbours.Can we do a better job of lending to farmers? Monica Lambon-Quayefio of the University of Ghana tells Tim Phillips about a digital lending product for farmers in southern Ghana shows what this approach can do — but also where it still falls short. Working with Farmerline, a social enterprise that scores creditworthiness from farm and sales data rather than formal records, the trial randomly assigned eligible applicants to receive input loans worth around $40. Farm input expenditures rose by around 11%. But not profits. Find out why in this week's episode.The research behind this episode:Karlan, Dean, Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Utsav Manjeer, and Christopher Udry. 2026. "Access to Digital Credit for Smallholder Farmers: Experimental Evidence from Ghana." Journal of Development Economics 181.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Monica Lambon-Quayefio. 2026. "Can digital credit unlock investment in smallholder farms?" VoxDev Talk Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Monica Lambon-QuayefioMonica Lambon-Quayefio is a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Ghana, where her research focuses on social protection, agricultural technology, and experimental methods in development economics. The paper discussed in this episode is co-authored with Dean Karlan, Utsav Manjeer, and Christopher Udry, all of Northwestern University.More VoxDev Talks on this topicMobile money in Ghana: Lessons for boosting financial inclusion: Tim Phillips speaks with Francis Annan about what Ghana's experience with mobile money reveals about reducing fraud and misconduct in rural financial systems, and what it takes for digital finance to reach the very poor.What have we learned about microfinance?: What decades of research have established, where the evidence remains contested, and what the most important open questions are for policymakers thinking about expanding access to credit in low-income settings.Related reading on VoxDevThe impact of digital credit in low-income countries: an overview of the evidence on how digital lending products affect borrowers, including the risks of overborrowing and the conditions under which short-term digital credit translates into improved economic outcomes.How to boost digital banking adoption and savings in Ghana: evidence on what drives uptake of digital financial services among low-income households in Ghana, and what works when trying to shift behaviour away from informal savings arrangements.

Three times since the 1970s, global imbalances have grown large. In the 1980s, the US trade deficit ballooned under Volcker's tight money and Reagan's tax cuts and military spending. In the 2000s, a global savings glut and then a US housing credit boom pushed the deficit to 6% of GDP. Today, the imbalances are back. The US current account deficit stood at 3.9% of GDP in 2025. The policy medicine this time: tariffs.Maurice Obstfeld of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and CEPR has written a chapter in the fourth Paris Report, published jointly by CEPR and Bruegel, examining that history, how policymakers responded, and what it can tell us about the effectiveness of policy remedies in 2026. He tell Tim Phillips that blaming foreigners misdiagnoses the problem if the US saves too little and invests heavily. The gap has to be financed from abroad. Good policy for the new global imbalances would requires three actors to move together: fiscal consolidation in the US, stronger consumption in China, and more investment in Europe. All three would benefit, none are close to doing it. The longer the can is kicked, Obstfeld warns, the greater the risk that the resolution arrives the way it always has: not through policy, but through crisis.The report discussed in this series of episodes:Rey, Hélène, Beatrice Weder di Mauro, and Jeromin Zettelmeyer (eds). 2026. The New Global Imbalances. Paris Report 4. CEPR Press and Bruegel. Free to download at cepr.org.The chapter discussed in this episode:Obstfeld, Maurice. 2026. "Global imbalances redux." In Rey, Weder di Mauro, and Zettelmeyer (eds), The New Global Imbalances. Paris Report 4. CEPR Press and Bruegel.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Maurice Obstfeld. 2026. “Global imballances redux”, VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Paris Report 4The fourth Paris Report, The New Global Imbalances, is a joint publication of CEPR and Bruegel. It was edited by Hélène Rey (London Business School and CEPR), Beatrice Weder di Mauro (Geneva Graduate Institute and CEPR, and President of CEPR), and Jeromin Zettelmeyer (Bruegel and CEPR). The report examines how, in a high-debt and fragmented world, excess savings, rising surpluses, and rising deficits pose a risk to stability and undermine the global trading system. It is free to download at cepr.org.About the guestMaurice Obstfeld is Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a Research Fellow of CEPR. He served as Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2015 to 2018. His research spans international finance, exchange rate economics, and macroeconomic policy. He is a former member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama.Research cited in this episodeThe Plaza Accord (1985) was a joint agreement between the US, West Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan to intervene in foreign exchange markets to depreciate the US dollar. It was negotiated because a surging dollar, driven by Volcker's tight monetary policy and the Reagan fiscal expansion, had pushed the US current account deficit to then-unprecedented levels and created severe competitive pressure on US manufacturing. The accord moved the dollar, but did not resolve the underlying imbalances; those were corrected by German reunification and the Japanese asset bubble, which were not planned by anyone.The Louvre Accord (1987) was a follow-up agreement among the same countries to stabilise the dollar once it had depreciated far enough. Obstfeld uses both episodes to illustrate that exchange rate agreements address the symptom, not the cause, and tend to sidestep the hard political decisions about fiscal policy.The global savings glut hypothesis, associated with Ben Bernanke, holds that rising savings outside the US in the early 2000s, particularly from Asian economies building dollar reserves after the Asian financial crisis and from oil exporters, depressed global interest rates and drove capital into US assets. Obstfeld argues that from around 2002 onward the better explanation is US demand pulling capital in: loose Fed policy, the housing boom, subprime lending, and equity extraction from rising home values all drove US spending higher, and the current account deteriorated as the dollar fell rather than rose.The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is US tax legislation that prevents the expiration of tax cuts that had been written into law, effectively delivering a tax reduction. Obstfeld points out that by lowering national saving it pushes the current account in the opposite direction to what the administration wants, partly undoing whatever modest deficit-reducing effect the tariffs might have through their revenue.The Draghi report and the Letta report are European policy documents calling for deeper integration, more investment, improved competitiveness, and a completion of the EU's capital markets and banking unions. Obstfeld cites them as pointing in the right direction for reducing Europe's current account surplus, alongside the defence spending increases that European countries are now pursuing.More VoxTalks Economics episodesThis episode is the first of two published simultaneously to mark the launch of Paris Report 4. In the second episode, Gilles Moëc, Chief Economist at AXA, explains why the US government is so keen to promote stablecoins and the risks they may pose to the financial system in the US and Europe.For an interview with two of the report's editors, Beatrice Weder di Mauro and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, on the problem of global imbalances, listen to The Sound of Economics, Bruegel's podcast. Available at bruegel.org.

Rich people live longer than poor people in every country that researchers have studied. In the United States today, the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1% of individuals exceeds ten years. The relationship between money and health is steepest at the bottom of the income distribution, where additional resources buy the most: when people are poor, there is a great deal that money can do for their health. In this week's episode, Adriana Lleras-Muney of UCLA tells Tim Phillips that the evidence on the relationship between poverty and health is less certain than policymakers tend to assume. Causality runs in both directions: poor health is one of the fastest routes into poverty, and understanding how much of the association flows in each direction is still an active debate. Giving poor people more money does not reliably translate into better health within the timescales and amounts that most experiments can test, because the details matter: how long the transfer lasts, whether it is conditional, and what receiving it signals about a person's economic future all shape what they actually do with it.The most consistent finding from the policy evidence is that public health insurance and access to cheap, proven preventive interventions tend to deliver more reliable health gains than cash transfers — but whether either works in practice depends heavily on the implementation and the trust that governments can build with the populations they are trying to help.The research behind this episode:Lleras-Muney, Adriana, Hannes Schwandt, and Laura R. Wherry. 2025. "Poverty and Health." Annual Review of Economics 17.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim and Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2026. "Poverty and Health." VoxDev Talk (podcast).Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Adriana Lleras-MuneyAdriana Lleras-Muney is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where her research focuses on health economics and the relationship between socioeconomic conditions and health outcomes across the life course. The paper discussed in this episode is co-authored with Hannes Schwandt (Northwestern University) and Laura R. Wherry (NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service).More VoxDev Talks on this topicThe history of cash transfers: Tim Phillips speaks with Ugo Gentilini about his research tracing 2,500 years of giving people money, from Ancient Rome to the COVID pandemic, and what history reveals about the recurring debates over when and why cash transfers work.Improving access to and use of clean water: Tim Phillips speaks with Pascaline Dupas about why access to clean water remains one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available, and the barriers that prevent its wider adoption in low-income settings.Related reading on VoxDevCash transfers reduce adult and child mortality rates in low- and middle-income countries: evidence that unconditional cash transfers have measurable effects on mortality in poor settings, with implications for how we think about the relationship between income and health.Effective health aid: Evidence from Gavi's vaccine programme: what a large-scale vaccination programme reveals about the conditions under which targeted public health interventions can make a lasting difference in low-income countries.

If the biggest thing holding you back from investing is just not knowing where to begin, we have got you covered today. We break down what really matters when choosing an investment platform - beyond the hype and flashy interfaces. What do you most need as an investor and how can you match your investment needs from Singapore with a cost-effective platform? We also unpack copy trading, platform safety, and how to switch brokers without derailing your long-term plan.]Join the conversation, hosted by Michelle Martin with guest Tim Phillips, Founder, TimTalksMoney.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Eighty years after Indian independence, the economic fingerprint of British colonial rule is still visible at the district level. Two institutions in particular left scars: whether a district was governed directly by British administrators or by one of India's roughly 680 Indian princes, and what kind of land tax arrangement the British put in place. For example, by 1991, directly ruled districts had nine percentage points fewer middle schools and a 20-percentage-point lower probability of having a road than areas under indirect rule. The question was whether those gaps would eventually close.Lakshmi Iyer of the University of Notre Dame tells Tim Phillips that by 2011 infrastructure gaps had closed completely. Targeted post-independence programmes, including the Minimum Needs Program of the 1970s and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan of 2001, pushed schools, health centres, and roads towards underserved districts. The picture for land tenure is mixed. Areas that historically had landlord-based systems are still 17% behind non-landlord areas in wheat yields, and the gap in fertiliser use has widened rather than narrowed. One reason, the policy response was a universal subsidy rather than being specifically aimed at places that had fallen behind.So colonial legacies can be erased, but only by policies designed to reach the places that were left behind. When policies have equalisation built in, historical gaps disappear. When they do not, the gaps persist.The research behind this episode:Iyer, Lakshmi and Coleson Weir. 2025. "The colonial legacy in India: How persistent are the effects of historical institutions?" Journal of Development Economics 177.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim and Lakshmi Iyer. 2026. "The colonial legacy in India: How persistent are the effects of historical institutions?" VoxDev Talk (podcast).Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Lakshmi IyerLakshmi Iyer is Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame and a Research Fellow at CEPR. Her research focuses on political economy, governance, and the long-run effects of historical institutions in developing countries. The paper discussed in this episode extends two of her earlier papers, one co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee and one sole-authored, both of which are listed in the research cited section below. Research cited in this episodeIyer, Lakshmi. 2010. "Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences." Review of Economics and Statistics 92 (4). The original paper documenting that areas brought under direct British rule had significantly lower access to schools, health centres, and roads in the post-colonial period, using Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse as an instrument for the selectivity of British annexation.Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Lakshmi Iyer. 2005. "History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India." American Economic Review 95 (4). Finds that districts where the British assigned proprietary rights in land to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investment and productivity in the post-independence period than areas where rights went to individual cultivators.Nunn, Nathan. 2007. "Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa's Past to its Current Underdevelopment." Journal of Development Economics 83 (1). Develops the theoretical case for why economies displaced into a low-production equilibrium by extraction or oppression can remain there long after the original impetus disappears.More VoxDev Talks on this topicIndia's economic development since independence: Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian discuss how India's transformation across eight decades of independence has defied conventional models of development, and what it reveals about the relationship between political economy and growth.Related reading on VoxDevDrawing the line: The short- and long-term consequences of partitioning India: examines the economic and political legacy of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, and how a boundary drawn in the final weeks of empire continues to shape outcomes on both sides.Historical legacies and African development: surveys the evidence on how pre-colonial political organisation, colonial-era institutions, and the slave trade have shaped the long-run economic geography of sub-Saharan Africa.

China became the world's largest bilateral creditor to developing countries over two decades, and for most of that time the scale of what it was doing was effectively a state secret. Its state-owned banks lent close to $1 trillion to developing-country governments, structured roughly half those loans against commodity export revenues held in offshore accounts, and concentrated the riskiest lending in countries such as Venezuela, Angola, and Russia. Net financial flows turned negative in 2019, and the countries that borrowed now repay more to China than they receive in new lending.Sebastian Horn of the Kiel Institute tells Tim Phillips that despite the opacity and the distinctive collateral structures, we've seen this movie before, in the 1920s and 1980s: in the bust, serial short-term extensions of grace periods that defer payments without resolving the underlying debt, while affected countries cut spending to stay current. What Horn calls a "silent crisis" is underway in a cluster of highly indebted developing countries, too small to trigger global contagion but large enough to matter profoundly for the people living through it.The challenge is whether China's lenders, debtor governments, and the broader international financial architecture can coordinate the kind of relief that will make a difference.The research behind this episode:Horn, Sebastian, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch. 2025. "China's Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust." Journal of Economic Perspectives 39 (4).To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Sebastian Horn. 2026. "China's Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust." VoxDev Talk (podcast).Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Sebastian HornSebastian Horn is a professor of economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and at the University of Hamburg, where his research focuses on international finance, sovereign debt, and China's role as a global creditor. Research cited in this episodeAidData. 2021. AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset, Version 3.0. AidData, William & Mary. A comprehensive public dataset tracing Chinese government-backed lending and grants to 165 countries between 2000 and 2017, built from embassy records, parliamentary gazettes, central bank reports, and news sources. Much of the quantitative evidence in the episode depends on it, since China has never published a consolidated balance sheet of its overseas lending.More VoxDev Talks on this topicIs debt leading to the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources?: Tim Phillips speaks with Pushpam Kumar about how sovereign debt obligations shape governments' incentives to extract natural resources more intensively, and what that means for the long-run sustainability of resource-dependent developing economies.Related reading on VoxDevNavigating Senegal's unexpected debt crisis: how a country widely regarded as a model of fiscal prudence found itself in acute debt distress, and what the episode reveals about the vulnerabilities facing developing-country borrowers in the current environment.Chinese development finance and public opinion: evidence on how Chinese-funded infrastructure projects affect attitudes towards China in recipient countries, with implications for understanding the political economy of China's overseas lending strategy.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of electronic transactions tripled in six Latin American economies. The share of adults using digital wallets, mobile money, and mobile bank accounts went from 3% in 2011 to 40% by 2021. A region that not long ago was defined by financial disasters, hyperinflation, and deep mistrust of banks has become one of the world's leading examples of how digital payments can transform an economy.Diego Vera-Cossio edited Beyond Cash, The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Inter-American Development Bank's new regional microeconomic report on digital payments. He tells Tim Phillips how the effects of this revolution are more profound that freeing people from the need to carry cash. In Santiago, bus robberies fell when drivers stopped handling cash. In Brazil, firms in the most cash-intensive sectors grew substantially after the instant payment system Pix launched. In Colombia, people without any credit history started borrowing formally after being nudged to receive their social program payments digitally. And in Bolivia, where 80% of the workforce is informal, people are scanning QR codes at street market stalls. The question Diego, his colleagues, and policymakers int he region and beyond, are now trying to answer is how to build on all of that, and how to make it stick.The research behind this episode:Vera-Cossio, Diego A., ed. 2025. Beyond Cash: The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean. Latin American and Caribbean Microeconomic Report. Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim and Vera-Cossio, Diego A. 2026. "Beyond Cash: The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean." VoxDev Talk (podcast). Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Diego Vera-CossioDiego A. Vera-Cossio is a senior economist in the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank, where he works on social protection, financial inclusion, digital payments, and the design of public programmes in Latin America. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, San Diego. Research cited in this episodeDominguez, Patricio. 2022. "Victim Incentives and Criminal Activity: Evidence from Bus Driver Robberies in Chile." Review of Economics and Statistics 104 (5). Exploits the reform that removed cash from Santiago buses to show that eliminating the cash target reduces robbery rates. The bus driver no longer carries anything worth taking.Vera-Cossio, Diego A., Bridget Hoffman, Camilo Pecha, and Carla Hernandez. 2024. "Does Adopting Digital Payment for Cash Transfers Improve the Financial Inclusion and Financial Well-Being of Low-Income Households?" IDB Research Insights. A randomised experiment in Colombia: unbanked beneficiaries of a social transfer programme were randomly encouraged to receive payments into digital wallets. Those who switched had fewer failed payment attempts, could check their balance without internet access via SIM, and were more likely to take out a formal loan for the first time.Inter-American Development Bank. 2024. Fintech Ecosystem in Latin America and the Caribbean Exceeds 3,000 Startups. Survey counts of fintech companies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Found roughly 700 fintechs in the region in 2017 and more than 3,000 by 2023, with 20% of them offering payment-related products.More VoxDev Talks on this topicMobile money in Ghana: Lessons for boosting financial inclusion: Tim Phillips speaks with Francis Annan about what the Ghanaian mobile money experience reveals about reducing fraud and misconduct in rural financial systems, and what that means for how mobile money can serve the very poor.Mobile money markets and financial inclusion in Africa: Nicola Limodio discusses what happened when mobile money operators in Africa were required to make their platforms interoperable, lowering fees but also reducing rural coverage. A direct parallel to the interoperability debate in Latin America.Related reading on VoxDevDigital financial services go a long way: Evidence from Mexico: evidence on how expanding digital payments and digital financial services affects spending, savings, and economic outcomes in a large middle-income country.The wide-ranging benefits of fostering financial inclusion in Mexico: on how policies that bring people into the formal financial system in Mexico produce benefits that extend well beyond the financial sector itself.VoxDevLit: Mobile Money: a curated literature review covering what research has established about mobile money, financial inclusion, and economic outcomes, useful for anyone who wants a broader picture of the evidence base behind the episode.

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.

For 70 years, a simple idea has shaped efforts to reduce prejudice: put people from different groups together under the right conditions, and contact reduces prejudice. Gordon Allport proposed it in 1954. A landmark 2006 meta-analysis of 515 studies seemed to confirm it, reporting an average effect of 0.4 standard deviations on prejudice measures. That paper has been cited more than 14,000 times. The credibility revolution has undermined this evidence, by correcting for publication bias that meant null results were seldom published. Matt Lowe of the Vancouver School of Economics has published a new review of 41 pre-registered studies, and he finds the average effect is one-tenth of a standard deviation. Those 41 pre-registered intergroup contact experiments cover nearly 40,000 participants across a wide range of countries, roughly half of them in the Global South. He tells Tim Phillips that the effects are real, consistently positive … but consistently small. Contact interventions are a waste of time. Costs can be low, and the alternatives have not yet been held to the same rigorous standard. But the gap between what the old literature promised and what careful experiments deliver is large enough to matter for anyone designing programmes to reduce prejudice between groups.The research behind this episode:Lowe, Matt. 2025. "Has Intergroup Contact Delivered?" Annual Review of Economics 17.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim. 2026. "Has Intergroup Contact Delivered?" VoxDev Talk (podcast). Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Matt LoweMatt Lowe is an assistant professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, and a J-PAL faculty affiliate whose research spans intergroup relations, development, and political economy. His website is at mattjlowe.github.io. He has previously been published in VoxDev discussing his field experiment on collaborative and adversarial caste integration through cricket leagues in India.Research cited in this episodeAllport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley. The founding text of intergroup contact theory, which proposed that contact between groups reduces prejudice when it meets four conditions: equal status, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and support from authorities.Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. 2006. "A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (5). The 515-study meta-analysis that established the 0.4 standard deviation benchmark for contact effects and became the dominant reference point for the field.Paluck, Elizabeth Levy, Roni Porat, Chelsey S. Clark, and Donald P. Green. 2021. "Prejudice Reduction: Progress and Challenges." Annual Review of Psychology 72. A review of 418 experiments on prejudice reduction from 2007 to 2019, identifying troubling signs of publication bias and finding that most studies evaluate light-touch, small-scale interventions with uncertain long-term effects.Scacco, Alexandra, and Shana S. Warren. 2018. "Can Social Contact Reduce Prejudice and Discrimination? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria." American Political Science Review 112 (3). A randomised field experiment mixing Christian and Muslim young men in a vocational training programme in Kaduna, Nigeria. Contact reduced discriminatory behaviour but did not change attitudes.Mousa, Salma. 2020. "Building Social Cohesion between Christians and Muslims through Soccer in Post-ISIS Iraq." Science 369 (6505). Randomly assigned Iraqi Christian displaced persons to football teams with Muslim teammates. Effects were positive on behaviours within the intervention but did not generalise to interactions with Muslim strangers outside it.Chakraborty, Anujit, Arkadev Ghosh, Matt Lowe, and Gareth Nellis. 2024. "Learning About Outgroups: The Impact of Broad Versus Deep Interactions." SSRN Working Paper. A field experiment in India finding that broad contact (meeting many different outgroup members) corrects misperceptions about outgroups, while deep contact (sustained interaction with one person) builds social and economic ties. Neither type generalises fully to the wider outgroup.Lowe, Matt. 2021. "Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration." American Economic Review 111 (6). Randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to cricket teams or control groups, finding that collaborative contact increased cross-caste friendships and efficiency in trade while adversarial contact reduced them.More VoxDev Talks on this topicPromoting national integration in Nigeria: Tim Phillips talks to Oyebola Okunogbe about her research on the Nigerian National Youth Service Corps, which posts university graduates to states other than their own to promote national integration through intergroup contact.Peacemaking, peacebuilding and post-war reconstruction: Salma Mousa and Lisa Hultman discuss what the evidence shows about building peace and social cohesion after conflict, including which interventions hold up and which do not.Building social cohesion in ethnically mixed schools: an intervention in Turkey: Sule Alan discusses a programme designed to build cohesion between children from different ethnic backgrounds in Turkish schools, with effects on peer violence, reciprocity, and interethnic friendships.Related reading on VoxDevHow competition between villages helped divided communities in Indonesia: in ethnically diverse or divided settings, shared efforts towards a collective external goal can help bridge internal divides and build a shared identity.Reducing prejudice towards forced migrants through perspective taking: evidence on how perspective-taking interventions affect attitudes towards refugees and displaced populations.How a documentary film fostered interethnic harmony in Bangladesh: a media-based approach to reducing intergroup prejudice, examining what content and delivery can shift attitudes at scale.

When markets shake, your instincts may tell you to run and turn your equities into cash - but history suggests, that action may be an expensive mistake. Michelle Martin speaks with Tim Phillips, Founder of TimTalksMoney, about why investors instinctively flee equities during turmoil - and why that move may actually be self-sabotage. What separates disciplined investors from panicked sellers in turbulent times? We find out in this episode of Money and Me hosted by Michelle Martin.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In cities across low- and middle-income countries, traffic crawls 24 hours a day. In Dhaka during rush hour, speeds average around 15km/h. At three in the morning, when the roads are empty, they average about 20km/h. Urban transport in the developing world is not only slow because of congestion. And so congestion policy, Adam Storeygard of Tufts University argues, gets you a small fraction of the way to solving the problems of urban transport in LMICs.That counterintuitive finding is one many themes in Storeygard's wide-ranging review of what research actually tells us about how people in LMICs get from A to B. From informal minibuses to bus rapid transit, from a field experiment in Bangalore that tested congestion pricing to the long shadow of colonial railroads still shaping African trade today, the picture that emerges is more nuanced and more interesting than many policy blueprints suggest. He tells Tim Phillips what the evidence supports, where it runs out, and why fixing the roads won't fix everything.The research behind this episode:Storeygard, Adam. 2025. "Transport in Low- and Middle-Income Countries." NBER Working Paper 34354. Forthcoming in a special issue of Regional Science and Urban Economics.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim. 2026. "Transport in Low- and Middle-Income Countries." VoxDev Talk (podcast). Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Adam StoreygardAdam Storeygard is Professor of Economics at Tufts University, where his research focuses on urbanisation, transportation, and the economic geography of the developing world, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. Much of his work uses geographic and satellite data to study how infrastructure shapes where people live, how they move, and how economies develop.Research cited in this episodeAkbar, Prottoy Aman, Victor Couture, Gilles Duranton, and Adam Storeygard. 2023. "The Fast, the Slow, and the Congested: Urban Transportation in Rich and Poor Countries." NBER Working Paper 31642. The paper behind the Dhaka finding: assembling travel speed data across 1,200 cities in 152 countries, the authors show that cities in poor countries are roughly half as fast as those in rich countries, and that most of the gap is not congestion but structural low speeds in the absence of traffic.Björkegren, Daniel, Alice Duhaut, Geetika Nagpal, and Nick Tsivanidis. 2025. "Public and Private Transit: Evidence from Lagos." Working paper. When Lagos introduced a major new public bus system, informal drivers on affected routes left,  so bus frequency on those routes fell on net. The big benefit accrued to other routes that informal drivers switched to, where prices and waiting times fell. Winners and losers, not a clean gain.Franklin, Simon. 2018. "Location, Search Costs and Youth Unemployment: Experimental Evidence from Transport Subsidies." Economic Journal 128 (614). A randomised trial in Addis Ababa: providing transport subsidies to unemployed young people helped them search for and find formal jobs. Effects did not persist once subsidies ended, raising questions about how much the transport constraint itself was the binding one.Borker, Girija. 2021. "Safety First: Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women." World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9731. Women in Delhi attend less selective colleges than male peers with identical academic credentials, not because they are not admitted, but because of perceived harassment risk during the commute. Delhi university students overwhelmingly live with their parents, and the daily journey matters as much as the institution.Kreindler, Gabriel. 2024. "Peak-Hour Road Congestion Pricing: Experimental Evidence and Equilibrium Implications." Econometrica 92 (4). A field experiment in Bangalore, paying drivers to avoid congested areas and times. The finding: congestion pricing would produce only modest benefits in Bangalore because traffic density has a relatively moderate impact on speed there, meaning you would have to charge astronomically high prices to shift behaviour significantly.Jedwab, Remi, and Adam Storeygard. 2022. "The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa 1960–2010." Journal of the European Economic Association 20 (1). Shows how transportation infrastructure investments, including the legacy of colonial railroads built primarily to connect mines to ports, continue to shape where Africans live and how countries trade, with consequences that push African economies toward overseas rather than intra-regional commerce.More VoxDev Talks on this topicMichelson, Hope, 2026, “African agriculture's underappreciated supply side.” VoxDev Talk. How transport links are one of the many impediments that stop rural farmers from making the most of the opportunities of better agricultural inputs.Related reading on VoxDev"Urban transport infrastructure in developing countries”, the VoxDevLit review of research on urban transport in LMICs, covering buses, BRT, subways, and informal transit networks."Who wins when public transit challenges private transit?”, the Lagos bus reform discussed in this episode, with further detail on how informal drivers responded to new public routes."Perceived risk of street harassment and college choice of women in Delhi”, Girija Borker's research on how commute safety shapes women's educational choices, as discussed by Storeygard in this episode."The equitable benefits of Colombia's bus rapid transit system”, complements the discussion of BRT in Bogota, one of Storeygard's three best-evidenced cases for BRT benefits.

The UFO public had high hopes when Congress created AARO to investigate UFO/USO/UAP incidents and report findings to both Congress and the public. Years later, AARO is widely viewed as a complete failure. Its first report was riddled with factual errors and typos. Its first director revealed himself to be a thin-skinned, diehard UFO skeptic, hardly an impartial investigator. Witnesses and whistleblowers say AARO ignored or belittled their testimony. As for transparency, AARO has released very few findings, even fewer UAP images, and a second report, as required by law, is many months overdue. The idea that a small office inside the Pentagon could rigorously investigate its own parent organization - the Department of War - seems preposterous on its face. But has AARO found even a single UFO incident it's been unable to debunk? The answer is yes. British journalist Chris Sharp, editor and publisher of Liberation Times, has demonstrated a remarkable ability to break story after story about UFO matters in both the US and the UK. Now he's wrangled an exclusive interview with AARO's former Deputy Director, Tim Phillips. Sharp's full interview could be published in days. In this episode of WEAPONIZED, Jeremy and George hear what Chris picked up from his extremely candid conversation with Phillips. The revelations are stunning. Phillips admitted AARO identified 40-50 cases showing "utterly bizarre" capabilities the "best and brightest people in the world" couldn't explain - instantaneous acceleration, right-angle turns, maneuvers no human aircraft can achieve. They "conclusively proved" these weren't adversary or friendly tech, yet never released a single video to the public. For the first time, a former AARO official confirmed UAPs detected in space. Some demonstrated "signature management" - actively avoiding detection over sensitive military locations. Despite admitting impossible performance characteristics, Phillips refused to say they're non-human or extraterrestrial. Chris describes it as "describing a dog without calling it a dog." His responses felt scripted and performative. Jeremy coins a new term: "Project Blue Box" - information flows in, nothing comes out. Phillips confirmed AARO approached Glenn Gaffney, the CIA Director George named under oath as blocking transfer of a non-human spacecraft. Shockingly, Phillips claimed he wasn't aware James Clapper admitted on camera the Air Force ran a UAP program above Area 51. How did AARO manage to screw everything up? Has it been an honest arbiter of UFO facts? And is there a future for AARO in light of President Trump's directive to federal agencies to release any and all UFO related files? *Follow Chris Sharp & Liberations Times ⁠https://x.com/ChrisUKSharp⁠ & ⁠https://LiberationTimes.com⁠

Cristina Gomez discusses journalist Chris Sharp's on-record interview with AARO's former acting director Tim Phillips, who confirms 40 to 50 unexplained UAP cases, UFO activity in space, and a CIA connection to an alleged blocked transfer of non-human technology from Lockheed Martin, while Senator Mike Rounds calls for UAP transparency — all as the State of the Union passes without a single mention of UFOs.To see the VIDEO of this episode, click or copy link - https://youtu.be/WYNwp9xE0a8Visit my website with International UFO News, Articles, Videos, and Podcast direct links -www.ufonews.co00:00 - UFO Office Speaks Out01:04 - 50 UFO Cases Unsolved02:28 - UFOs Spotted In Space05:22 - UFOs Avoiding Detection06:33 - UFO Cover Confirmed09:11 - Congress On UFOs10:11 - UFO Truth Still HiddenBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/strange-and-unexplained--5235662/support.

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.

A small number of Asian countries have provided thousands of high-skilled migrants to the US, many of whom have gone on to great success. What created this long-term trend, and what has it contributed to the US economy? And with changes in domestic policy, technology, and the opportunities in other countries, will it continue? Gaurav Khanna of UC San Diego tells Tim Phillips the story of high-skilled migration to the US and warns of the consequences for the US economy if, in the future, they decide to go elsewhere – or stay at home.

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.

With the number of global refugees continuing to rise, integrating refugees has become a difficult challenge for hosts – and it is far from easy for the refugees themselves. Dany Bahar of Brown University and Giovanni Peri of UC Davis tell Tim Phillips about a new review of the evidence that evaluates what policies have worked. 

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.

President Trump tells NBC News he’s going after criminal illegals - not the illegals. And he plans to be softer on the immigration issue. He also said he pulled 700 federal agents from Minneapolis.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Almost everywhere, women have less economic power than men, and earn less at work. Their commitment to childcare and work in the home gives them less spare time than men, as well as less recognition for the value of what they do. In another episodes based on the new book The London Consensus, published by LSE Press, Barbara Petrongolo of the University of Oxford, who one of the authors of the book's chapter on Labour markets and gender inequality, and Ashwini Deshpande of Ashoka University, who wrote a response discuss with Tim Phillips whether there is a consensus on policy – and way to implement it – in this area. Download The London Consensus. https://www.lse.ac.uk/school-of-public-policy/research/london-consensus

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.

Agricultural yields across sub-Saharan Africa are falling. We can create better seeds, fertilisers and insecticides which has the potential to increase agricultural yields. But what stops that potential being realised? We put a lot of attention on how to influence the behaviour or the choices of farmers, but what can policy also do to help the firms, large and small, that provide the inputs that farmers use? Hope Michelson of the University of Illinois is one of the authors of a new review of agricultural input markets. She tells Tim Phillips about the important gaps in our knowledge of how those markets are working.

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.

The new book The London Consensus is a large and very comprehensive successor to the Washington Consensus that dominated policymaking during the 1990s. It attempts to capture where the Washington consensus fell short, and suggest better policy for development.One area in which we need better policy is basic education. Despite the success of programmes to build and equip schools, outcomes are not improving. Pritchett's chapter in The London Consensus examines the learning crisis and suggests what policy can do about it. He tells Tim Phillips that there are no short cuts – but examples from around the world show that solutions are possible. 

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.

Labor markets in poor countries are very different to labour markets in rich countries. Millions of young people in developing economies who will be starting work in the next few years will face rationed jobs, volatile employment, and low-quality work. How will they cope and how can policy best help them?Emily Breza of Harvard University and Supreet Kaur of UC Berkeley are the authors of a new review of how labour markets in developing countries. They tell Tim Phillips some surprising facts about how labour markets work, what policy can do better – and what we still need to discover to help those young jobseekers find decent work.

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

Show Starts at 30s mark.  In this episode the host opens with the podcast game "Word on Word," comparing Psalm 90:12 and 2 Corinthians 4:16 before moving into a wide-ranging, fast-paced examination of current events, media manipulation, and spiritual warfare. The show covers daily Proverbs as a recommended spiritual practice and then pivots to a detailed breakdown of a recent Truth Social post by former President Donald Trump — an image of a windmill with Hebrew text, a number 13 on the tower and a 09:11 timestamp — and why the host believes that image may carry layered symbolic meaning linking Israel, 9/11 imagery, and political signaling. The host analyzes global reactions and geopolitical tensions, including protests in Iran, the U.S. response to human-rights abuses, and shifting alliances among nations such as Russia, China, Israel, and Western democracies. He critiques contemporary censorship trends in the U.K. and elsewhere and explains how psychological operations are being tailored to different regions and audiences to foster large-scale social change. A large portion of the episode is dedicated to recent exposures inside conservative media and activist circles: the rise of citizen journalist Nick Shirley, scrutiny of Turning Point USA and key figures (including Erica Kirk and the late Charlie Kirk), and allegations about movement infiltration. The host explores links to influential networks — from alleged Rothstein/Rothschild connections to the political machinery of Americans for Prosperity and Tim Phillips — and discusses suspicious patterns, shell companies, and apparent PR playbooks used to shape narratives. Occult and fraternal symbolism are also examined: the host highlights Masonic language and visual cues at memorial events, suspicious bookshelf imagery behind media figures, and what he views as ritualized elements surrounding high-profile incidents. He warns listeners that these phenomena should be seen not only as political or social operations but as part of a broader spiritual campaign aimed at deceiving believers. Throughout the episode the host urges vigilance, prayer, and scriptural grounding as the response to deception. He announces a community prayer meeting on Saturday (8 PM EST via Telegram) and previews an upcoming Sunday Bible study on 1 Corinthians (the "love chapter"). Expect a blend of news analysis, religious reflection, conspiracy exposure, and practical spiritual exhortation aimed at helping listeners discern truth and remain faithful amid cultural upheaval. Want to Understand and Explain Everything Biblically?  Click Here: Decoding the Power of Three: Understand and Explain Everything or go to www.rightonu.com and click learn more.  Thank you for Listening to Right on Radio. Prayerfully consider supporting Right on Radio. Click Here for all links, Right on Community ROC, Podcast web links, Freebies, Products (healing mushrooms, EMP Protection) Social media, courses and more... https://linktr.ee/RightonRadio Live Right in the Real World! We talk God and Politics, Faith Based Broadcast News, views, Opinions and Attitudes We are Your News Now. Keep the Faith