VoxTalks Economics

21:03

S9 Ep57: Merit, masters and China's imperial exam

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/10/02

For more than 1,300 years, China chose its top officials by written exam. Its top officials were chosen meritocratic ally -- or were they?When the results came out, each successful candidate went to pay his respects to the men who had marked his exam. He called the examiner master, and the bond lasted for life.Ruixue Jia (UC San Diego, CEPR) and her co-author Ying Bai followed 24,269 graduates of the Qing dynasty's imperial examination, from 1644 to 1905, to see who reached the top of the imperial

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29:25

S9 Ep56: Decoupling from China after Trump's Trade Wars

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/09/25

In March 2025, Apple chartered cargo flights to deliver 600 tonnes of iPhones from India to the United States. A year earlier, four in five smartphones that imported to the US came from China. One of the aims of US trade policy has been to decouple the US economy from China. So is the strategy working? Chad Bown (PIIE, CEPR) tells Tim Phillips how he examined the US import data product by product to see how American importers coped with Trump's second trade war. In consumer electronics, many firms

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25:59

S9 Ep55: Loosening inheritance law

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/09/18

In most of the world you do not get to choose who inherits your money. Across continental Europe, Latin America, and countries governed by Islamic law, a minimum share of your estate will be reserved for your children, your spouse, and in some places your surviving parents. Write a will that ignores them and the law overrules you. If you want a head start in life, choose your parents carefully.Switzerland changed the rules in January 2023. The compulsory share for children fell by one third and the

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18:23

S9 Ep54: Does sacking the manager work?

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/09/11

Your football team keeps losing. The season is slipping away. One thing can be changed by Friday, and the crowd is already singing about it: sack the manager.Jan van Ours (Erasmus School of Economics, CEPR, Feyenoord fan) has looked at seven seasons of the Dutch top flight and 31 managers who were sacrificed mid-season. To work out whether any of them deserved it, he uses bookmaker odds and expected goals to distinguish bad play from bad luck. The new-manager bounce is real: results improve after a

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33:19

S9 Ep53: Lessons from Populism in Latin America

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/09/04

The new episode of VoxTalks Economics traces the effects of South Americans populism, left and right. Alejandro Werner (Georgetown Americas Institute) is one of the authors of a new paper that traces populist governments across Latin America back to 1970. He argues that they follow a strikingly similar script: they expand spending, weaken the institutions built to restrain them, and ride the wave until inflation catches up with them. But the most recent generation of leaders -- Chávez and Maduro,

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26:21

S9 Ep52: The Dollar Anchor Is Slipping

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/09/02

April 2025: Liberation Day. President Trump announces sweeping new tariffs. And then, the dollar did something a safe haven currency is not supposed to do: it fell.Tarek Hassan (Boston University, CEPR), working with Thomas Mertens, Jingye Wang and Tony Zhang, has been investigating what makes a currency the global anchor. Being the world's biggest economy helps, but what really matters is how far an economy's shocks affect world prices. Tariffs reduce this effect. But are we near a tipping point,

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16:24

S9 Ep51: Fiscal Populism and Monetary Policy

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/08/28

There is a saying in Spanish: get burned by hot milk, and the sight of a cow makes you cry. New research implies that, decades after a populist government leaves office, the central bank it once tried to control is still flinching.Martín Uribe (Columbia) and Nicolás Magud (IMF) have investigated the long-run effect of populist governments that leaned on their central banks to print money and feed inflation. They find that these central banks raise interest rates more aggressively than others when

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24:27

S9 Ep50: Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Exchange Rate

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/08/26

Textbook economics says a tariff should strengthen a country's currency. Since the start of 2025, as US tariffs rose ... and the dollar fell.In the first of four episodes of Voxtalks based on papers presented at the second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference, Alfonso Merendino (Bocconi University) and Tommaso Monacelli (Bocconi University, CEPR) tell Tim Phillips what they found when they looked for reasons. Their conclusion: for tariffs, it's not size, it is how

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21:19

S9 Ep49: Combatting sexual harassment in the military

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/08/21

Norwegian conscripts arrive at boot camp straight out of school. They are assigned at random to a shared room and they live in it for the next eight weeks. Whatever the culture of that room turns out to be, they are stuck with it.We know that the military everywhere has a poor record on sexual harassment. Johanna Rickne (Stockholm University, CEPR) and her co-authors wanted to reduce its acceptance, and the number of incidents. Compulsory training, standing a in a room a showing a PowerPoint, has a

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18:12

S9 Ep48: What price to save Japan's ghost towns?

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/08/14

In the oldest Japanese municipalities, close to half the residents are already over 65. As young people move to cities, the retailers close, then the clinics, then the bus that used to reach the next town. Rural Japan is not simply ageing: it is emptying.Elisa Giannone (CREI, CEPR) and her co-authors have analysed Japan's 1,741 municipalities from 1980 onwards. The oldest quarter of them lost around 26% of their population by 2010; the youngest quarter grew by 22%, and the gap between them is still

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33:20

S9 Ep47: The Next Generation: PSE 2026

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/08/07

Travel broadens the mind. So the Voxtalks visits a conference, we find the most interesting research from economists just starting out, and hand three of them a microphone. Ad that is today's episode, recorded at the CEPR Paris School of Economics Policy Forum 2026.Listen to hear three findings that undercut conventional wisdom. Guido Lamarmora (University of Nottingham) argues that the usual policy prescription for developing economies that want to industrialise of raising agricultural

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20:25

S9 Ep46: Absorbing shocks since 1891

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/08/05

Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2026.A country wants a stable exchange rate, it wants money to move freely across its borders, and it wants to set its own interest rates. It's a well-known trilemma. Central bankers must pick any two, because you cannot have all three. History, it turns out, did not read that memo.Eric Monnet has spent years reading the balance sheets that central bankers kept on each other. Since 1891 the Bank of France paid teams of multilingual economists to copy out the

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31:16

S9 Ep45: Tariff Confusion

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/31

If you run a business that exports to the United States, how big is the tariff you have to pay? In 2025 that question was hard to answer. Between February and December, 53 separate announcements introduced, delayed, reinstated or changed US tariffs, with different countries and products pulled in or exempted each time.Kalina Manova (UCL, CEPR) and her colleagues built a database of every one of those announcements, but they also measured the confusion that those announcements created. She tells

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15:54

S9 Ep44: How superpowers shape trade

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/29

Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris School of Economics.Tariffs move trade around, but so does economic power. When one economy dominates, other countries fall into step with it. They trade with the dominant economy, and also with each other. Alberto Martin (Barcelona School of Economics, CEPR) is one of a team that has tracked the influence of hegemons, large dominant economies, on trade from the start of the 19th century. In our latest VoxTalk he tells Tim Phillips about how they used

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21:23

S9 Ep43: Navigating industrial policy

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/24

Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris.In 2019 the IMF called the increasing adoption of industrial policy: "The return of the policy that shall not be named". No one is scared to name it in 2026. Governments in rich and poor economies alike are intervening to change what their countries produce, and the pace has picked up sharply.Zsóka Kóczán (EBRD) was one of the leads on the Transition Report 2024-25, which draws on a database of more than 31,000 industrial policies in 150 economies. She

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20:00

S9 Ep42: The Safety Paradox

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/22

Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris School of Economics, June 2026.In 1941 the United States banned oil exports to Japan, to punish aggression without fighting a war. Historians now argue the embargo did the opposite, and hastened Japan's entry into the war.Isabelle Méjean (Sciences Po, CEPR) calls this "The safety paradox". Trade between rivals makes war more expensive. Cut that trade to protect your interests, and you make conflict cheaper, for your rival as well as for you. In a new

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20:29

S9 Ep41: Making teenagers read newspapers

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/17

French teenagers carry a smartphone with access to almost anything, but few of them have been using it to read the news.Julia Cagé (Sciences Po, CEPR) ran an experiment to test the one barrier everyone assumes matters most: the price of a newspaper. She and her co-authors gave free digital subscriptions to Le Monde and media education to thousands of French high school students for a year, and then tracked what the students actually read. It's a bit like persuading kids to eat vegetables when there

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24:11

S9 Ep40: Are net zero commitments greenwash?

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/15

Sixty-three percent of large companies worldwide had made a net zero commitment by 2023, up from close to none in 2018. But if the target date is 2050, that's several corporate lifetimes away, and the planet needs emission reductions today. What actually changes in the boardroom when a pledge is signed?Simon Dietz (LSE, CEPR) has tracked climate management practices and emissions at nearly 2,000 companies to find out. He tells Tim Phillips that the picture is not the one that either side of the

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20:57

S9 Ep39: Europe in 2050

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/10

Recorded at the Paris School of Economics-CEPR Policy Forum 2026. Europe is under attack from the US, and under a different kind of attack from China.That is Olivier Blanchard's diagnosis. Blanchard (MIT, Paris School of Economics, Peterson Institute) is one of four economists leading Europe 2050, a new CEPR initiative asking where Europe wants to be in 25 years, and how it gets there. Blanchard's overriding principle: a vision without plumbing goes nowhere, and plumbing without vision is just

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20:35

S9 Ep38: Europe in the Middle

VoxTalks Economics ·

2026/07/08

China cannot sell as much as it used to in the United States. That trade has to go somewhere, and somewhere might be Europe.In this week's VoxTalk, Tim Phillips asks Pol Antràs (Harvard) and Beata Javorcik (EBRD, Oxford) what this means for European producers and consumers.Antràs and Andrea Presbitero have mapped which countries and sectors face the sharpest competition from redirected Chinese exports, and which stand to gain. Does cheap Chinese tech ease Europe's energy cost crisis, or squeeze

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