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PODCAST

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity

The Brookings Institution

The Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity connects you to cutting edge economic policy research and the renowned economists who create it. On each episode, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity editors introduce new BPEA research and present a conversation between the author and a Brookings scholar to bridge the divide between economic theory and practical policy solutions.

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All Episodes

23:04

How much is climate change costing US households?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2025/10/23

Studies of the economic impacts of climate change often look at long-term, national costs. A new BPEA study takes a different approach, focusing on the current household level costs attributable to changing weather. The report authors examine a range of impacts, from mortality costs due of wildfire smoke to rising insurance costs along coastlines, to provide estimates of annual costs by region and socioeconomic status. On this episode of the Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity, two of the

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25:51

How do tariffs hurt the dollar?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2025/10/09

Roughly two thirds of countries on Earth stabilize their currency against the U.S. dollar. The relationship has benefits in both directions: Smaller countries enjoy better stability for their national currencies, and U.S. companies and government get low borrowing rates, among other benefits. But a new BPEA paper, “Trade War and the dollar anchor,” highlights how U.S. tariffs and retaliatory tariffs by other countries are putting pressure on the dollar’s place at the heart of world monetary system

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21:37

Do American workers still move to find work?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2025/06/12

Interstate migration has declined in the U.S. in recent decades, suggesting that workers are less likely to move in order to find employment. Such a trend would have significant policy implications for state and local governments, as well as at the federal level. But new research by Andrea Foschi, Christopher L. House, Christian Proebsting, and Linda L. Tesar suggests that it isn’t workers who have changed as much as differences in regional economies. On this episode of the Brookings Podcast on

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23:35

Was the economic recovery from COVID-19 unique?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2025/05/29

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic struck national economies like a hammer. As the disease spread, workers went home, businesses were empty, and economic indicators crashed. Now, five years later, the U.S. economy looks in many ways like it did pre-pandemic, with GDP back on to the pre-pandemic trend and unemployment down to around 4% after spiking to over 10% in 2020. On this episode of the Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity, Brookings Senior Fellow Louise Sheiner is joined by Harvard

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29:19

What is driving up housing costs across the US?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2025/05/15

Housing prices nationally are at an all-time high, including in many metro areas that were previously considered affordable alternatives to coastal markets. While prices have been rising over recent decades, the average growth rates of housing stock have been in decline. In a new BPEA paper, Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko explore the evolving dynamics of the U.S. housing market, focusing on six metropolitan areas and in particular on steep housing stock decreases in Sun Belt cities. On this

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24:26

How does the Federal Reserve affect the Treasury market?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2025/05/01

At around $900 billion in transactions daily, the market for U.S. Treasuries is massive, not only in terms of quantity but also in terms of importance to the U.S. and global economies. The Treasury market is tied to interest rates, the value of the dollar, and financial markets around the world. So when shocks hit the Treasury market, as they did during the COVID-19 crisis, the ripple effects can be global. In a new paper, “Treasury market dysfunction and the role of the central bank,” Anil K

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31:20

Why does the US have a trade deficit?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2025/04/17

The U.S. trade deficit has long been a source of political consternation, but it has come to the forefront in recent weeks. Just a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, he has made the trade deficit a key target of his aggressive tariff policies. On the day that President Trump announced a new, sweeping round of tariffs on all U.S. trade partners, Brookings Senior Fellow Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti was joined by Maurice Obstfeld of the Peterson Institute for International Economics to discuss

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33:22

How will the Federal Reserve revise its monetary...

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/12/18

The Federal Reserve’s “Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy”—commonly referred to as its monetary policy framework—is composed of guiding principles the central bank uses in setting and communicating policy. Since the Fed last updated this framework in 2020, the global economy has faced unique challenges: COVID-19 shutdowns, widespread supply chain issues, and multiple global wars. In 2025, the Fed Board will be tasked with reviewing the framework, identifying what has worked

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18:47

How will the clean energy transition affect wages?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/12/04

The clean energy transition has quietly pushed ahead in recent decades, with solar and wind energy accounting for almost 15% of total U.S. energy production in February 2024. The benefits of this transition on climate change have been celebrated, but less acknowledged have been the potential economic benefits. In a new paper, “The economic impacts of clean power,” Costas Arkolakis and Conor Walsh explain how cheaper electricity resulting from this transition could lead to a 2-3% increase in national

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21:58

How does Congress react to budget deficit projections?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/11/20

Fiscal deficit projections are used by policymakers to understand the trajectory of U.S. debt. Between 1984 and 2003, Congress was responsive to these projections, raising taxes and cutting spending when projections showed that the deficit would grow. However, since 2004, fiscal policy has ceased being responsive to debt projections regardless of the party in power. In a new paper, “Robust Fiscal Stabilization,” Alan Auerbach and Danny Yagan of the University of California, Berkeley, quantify this

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31:06

What is the value of dynamic scoring for legislators?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/11/06

When Congress considers legislation, nonpartisan agencies provide estimates of the law’s potential economic effects to policymakers, a process known as “scoring.” In recent decades, analysts at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation have developed models that incorporate complex feedback effects, going beyond conventional scoring techniques. These “dynamic scoring” methods can produce significantly different estimates of a law’s economic impact, but there are tradeoffs in

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33:35

What role should sanctions play in foreign policy?...

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/10/23

Since 2022, Western nations have put a number of sanctions on Russia in response to its war in Ukraine. Policymakers and pundits have debated the efficacy of these measures, but this debate is belied by a deeper question: what does it mean for sanctions to “work”? In new BPEA research, Oleg Itskhoki of Harvard and Elina Ribakova of the Peterson Institute for International Economics explore fundamental questions of the theory and practice of sanctions in the Russia context. On this episode of the

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26:05

What is the efficient rate of unemployment?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/10/09

The full-employment rate of unemployment may seem like a contradiction, but in fact, economists have long understood that some unemployment is necessary. In their new paper, Pascal Michaillat of UC Santa Cruz and Saez of the University of California, Berkeley present a new formula for identifying the efficient rate of unemployment in the U.S. and find that the labor market has been inefficiently slack for most of the last century. In this episode, Michaillat discusses the paper and potential impacts

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26:14

Did behavioral changes reduce COVID-19 deaths?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/06/20

As COVID-19 swept across the globe, many nations struggled to define a cohesive public health strategy to prevent the spread of the disease. However, in spite of the lack of a clear plan, improvised strategies of behavioral changes—e.g., masking, social distancing—slowed transmission until a vaccine could be developed. The new BPEA paper, “The impact of vaccines and behaviors on U.S. cumulative deaths from COVID-19,” estimates that the ad hoc strategy prevented close to 800,000 deaths. On this

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26:55

What should regulators do about the risks to...

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/06/06

The failure of three mid-sized banks in March 2023—three of the four largest bank failures in history—shook financial markets and could’ve spread to other banks if regulators hadn’t stepped in. Two on-going trends in finance contributed to these failures: an increase in uninsured deposits and the migration of business lending to non-banks. In a new paper, “The evolution of banking in the 21st century,” a group of Harvard researchers looked at regulations that could mitigate risks going forward as

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23:54

What global factors could make inflation less stable?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/05/23

Most advanced economies enjoyed a long period of low, stable inflation prior to 2021, with inflation in the U.S. actually running below the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target for much of the 2010s. This stability was driven in part by factors external to monetary policy, including downward price and wage pressures from globalization and de-unionization. However, the authors of a new BPEA paper, “Changing central bank pressures and inflation,” argue that emerging trends may present headwinds to

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31:03

What do Americans think about inflation?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/05/09

Many indicators suggest that the U.S. economy is thriving, yet Americans continue to have a negative overall economic outlook. Stubbornly high inflation has played a significant role in this negative sentiment among consumers, even as wage growth has caught up with the rate of inflation. In a new study, “Why do we dislike inflation?” Stefanie Stantcheva fielded a survey to explore how Americans experience inflation and why they have such strong feelings about it. In this episode of the Brookings

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24:18

Do US states have different recoveries from economic...

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/04/25

In the mid-20th century, U.S. states experienced recessions very differently from one another, which resulted in many workers migrating between states in search of work. But a newly developed dataset shows that economic recoveries have begun to look very similar across states in recent decades. On this episode, Senior Fellow Louise Sheiner talks with Andrew Fieldhouse and David Munro, authors of a new BPEA study that produced this dataset, “The emergence of a uniform business cycle in the United

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29:10

How did Jamaica halve its debt in 10 years?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2024/04/11

Many countries have faced harrowing debt burdens, and reducing the national debt is usually a lasting challenge. But in just five years, the Jamaica reduced its debt-to-GDP ratio by 40 percentage points, something only a handful of other countries have done in that time frame. On this episode of the BPEA podcast, Peter Blair Henry of Stanford and UC Berkeley's Barry Eichengreen join Brookings Senior Fellow Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti to discuss their new BPEA paper on the unique factors that enabled

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36:38

What do we miss in standard supply chain measures?

Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity ·

2023/12/21

The COVID-19 pandemic shone a spotlight on supply chains, with shortages in everything from baby formula to microchips. This spurred an on-going policy debate on the need for the U.S. to shore up its supply chains, in some cases literally moving production back to the U.S. or allied nations. However, new analysis published in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity showed that effort may be more difficult than standard supply chain data suggests, especially when it comes to limiting exposure to

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