VoxTalks Economics

24:43

S9 Ep37: Addressing Global Imbalances

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/03

Episode recorded on 19 June 2026 at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum in Paris.Twice before, the world's savings and debts have piled up in the wrong places, and twice the imbalance broke something. The first time it took the Plaza Accord to fix it. The second time it took a global financial crisis.Now we are in a third wave. Gita Gopinath (Harvard, former IMF Chief Economist and First Deputy Managing Director) and Philip Lane (European Central Bank, CEPR) join Tim Phillips to ask what is different this

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19:13

S9 Ep36: Helping the over-50s find work

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/01

Lose your job at 25 and someone will help you find another. Lose it at 55 and the talk quietly turns to how you might wind down towards retirement.Policymakers tend to assume job search training works for the young and not the old, so they rarely spend money trying. Bas van der Klaauw (Tinbergen Institute) thinks they got that wrong.In this week's VoxTalks Economics, he tells Tim Phillips about a Dutch experiment that put older unemployed workers through an intensive programme built on one idea:

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20:21

S9 Ep35: The success of the embedded state

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/06/26

Who kept the courts sitting and the streetlights lit when the state had almost no money to pay anyone?Two hundred years ago, British local government ran on unpaid labour. In a parliamentary survey of the boroughs from 1835, two in three of the people doing local government work were not paid at all.James Robinson (University of Chicago, CEPR) explains how this succeeded in this week's episode of VoxTalks Economics. Robinson and his co-authors call this the "embedded state". Members of the elite

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26:28

S9 Ep34: Making defence spending pay

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/06/19

Defence spending is rising whether voters like it or not. The UK has committed to 2.5% of national income and aims for nearer 3.5% over the next decade, £30bn a year for each percentage point. What does the country get back? Can defence spending be pro-growth?In this week's VoxTalk, John Van Reenen (LSE) argues that getting a return on investment based on innovation need not be left to luck. For example nuclear power, GPS and the internet all began as military projects. The spillovers can be

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19:09

S9 Ep33: Did the Sewing Machine Liberate Women?

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/06/12

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

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27:19

S9 Ep32: The digital money supply

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/06/05

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

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32:46

S9 Ep31: How well does patent screening work?

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/05/29

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,

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26:24

S9 Ep30: Redefining the monetary standard

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/05/22

The fiat money system has survived the Great Inflation, the global financial crisis, and a pandemic. But can it survive digital currencies?Bitcoin and the blockchain solved a genuine problem in computer science: how to stop people spending the same money twice. Forty years of successful inflation control means central bank money is stable; that is the stability in stablecoins, attempting to solve the volatility problem. What's next? What if the unit of account itself were indexed to consumer

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21:02

S9 Ep29: Guns and Butter

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/05/15

Europe's NATO members have pledged 3.5% of GDP to rearmament. The political argument is already about which social programmes will be sacrificed to pay for this, when the government chooses guns instead of butter. What does history tell us about what politicians will do?Christoph Trebesch and Johannes Marzian spent four years assembling the Global Budget Database: 150 years of primary government budget documents from 20 countries, with 116 identified military spending booms in peace and war. They

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25:27

S9 Ep28: Immigration and integration in Europe

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/05/08

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

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23:00

S9 Ep27: The right to choose to die

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/05/01

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

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31:09

S9 Ep26: The public origins of American innovation

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/04/24

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

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27:52

S9 Ep25: Rebalancing the Chinese economy

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/04/20

In 2003, Premier Wen Jiabao warned that China's growth model was unbalanced between supply and demand, over-reliant on investment and exports. More than 20 years later, the imbalance is smaller — but China is vastly larger. What its economy produces and exports now moves global markets. The argument about China's external surplus is no longer just a spat between Beijing and Washington.Yiping Huang, Dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, has written a chapter in the fourth

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31:02

S9 Ep24: Stablecoins and Global Imbalances

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/04/13

A radical macroeconomic experiment is under way at exactly the moment the US external position is showing signs of real stress.Gilles Moëc, Chief Economist at AXA, has written a chapter in the fourth Paris Report, published jointly by CEPR and Bruegel, on stablecoins: what they are, why the US government is so keen to promote them, and what risks they carry. His argument is that stablecoins are a fast-growing digital asset backed almost entirely by short-dated US government debt. When investors buy

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34:18

S9 Ep23: Global imbalances redux

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/04/13

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

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26:52

S9 Ep22: World War Trade

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/04/02

On 2 April 2025, the United States imposed tariffs on almost every country on earth. The next day, China responded with export controls on the entire world. In the space of one week, world trade had been weaponised as it has never been in peacetime.Richard Baldwin of IMD Business School, the founder of VoxEU and a former president of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, wrote World War Trade to make sense of the events of the last 12 months. The dramatic April salvos have settled into a trade

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24:39

S9 Ep21: The Bank of England's capital mistake?

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/03/27

"When you look at the world now, does it look more uncertain or less uncertain?" In December 2025, the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee (FPC) answered that question by cutting the equity capital requirement for UK banks. David Aikman (NIESR) and John Vickers (University of Oxford), two former senior Bank insiders who helped to design the regulatory framework post-GFC, think the committee got it wrong.The FPC lowered the benchmark capital requirement from 14% to 13% of risk-weighted

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20:59

S9 Ep20: What triggered January 6?

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/03/20

Two explanations circulated immediately after the March to Save America on January 6, 2021 turned into a riot: a mob manipulated by a demagogue, or ordinary citizens defending democracy against a stolen election. Konstantin Sonin, David Van Dijcke, and Austin Wright have used anonymised location data from forty million mobile devices to investigate why the protests escalated so dramatically.No surprise: partisanship was the strongest predictor of attendance, proximity to Proud Boys chapters and use

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33:12

S9 Ep19: Can blockchain decentralise money,...

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/03/17

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

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31:21

S9 Ep18: Will AI transform economic growth?

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/03/13

Could AI transform our economies to produce explosive growth? Most economists are sceptical at best. Anton Korinek of the University of Virginia, leader of the CEPR research policy network on AI, thinks the threshold is closer than those models suggest.In his latest work, Korinek, Tom Davidson, Basil Halperin, and Thomas Houlden, have built a growth model that captures what happens when AI starts automating AI research itself. Automation does two things simultaneously: it accelerates research, and

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