VoxTalks Economics

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 (Brande...

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...

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...

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...

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 publishe...

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....

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 wh...

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 Huan...

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...

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...

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...

"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 committ...

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 su...

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...

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...

Financial repression forces banks and citizens to hold government debt on terms the market would never accept. Economists have called it distortionary for fifty years. It never went away. Oleg Itskhoki and Dmitry Mukhin study what happens when a government runs out of options. Their paper traces how Russia deployed financial repression in 2022 to survive the largest sanctions package in postwar hi...

Ukraine has lost close to a quarter of its civilian workforce since the invasion. Three and a half million workers left government-controlled areas: mobilised into the armed forces, displaced inside the country, gone abroad as refugees, or killed.  Giacomo Anastasia, Tito Boeri, and Oleksandr Zholud draw on an unprecedented wartime dataset to document how Ukraine's labour market adapted under that...

Ukraine's cities were failing long before the Russian invasion began. Kyiv and Lviv ranked among the 40 most congested cities in the world, yet neither makes the top 100 by population. Ninety per cent of Ukraine's housing stock was built before 1990. Its urban infrastructure was designed for a Soviet economy and never properly adapted for the one that followed. So when reconstruction begins, the q...

Ukraine will emerge from this war with enormous debt. The conventional wisdom treats that as an obstacle: investors weigh it before committing capital, and the burden slows the recovery before it starts. Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Maurice Obstfeld of UC Berkeley argue the opposite. A thorough restructuring of Ukraine's war debts – including, for sufficiently large obligations, outright forgiveness –...

Recorded live at the CEPR Annual Symposium. We seem to be talking about the behaviour of alpha males on social media a lot recently. But what happens when we put them in charge of a country? The work of Mario Carillo of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona attempts to answer that question. He talks to Tim Phillips about when and why voters choose alpha males, and how they respond to being given power...

What type of manager would you be? An experiment in Ethiopia set out to measure the management traits of young professionals by setting them challenges in a video studio, and along the way also uncovered valuable (and surprising) information about the type of manager that employees and employers preferred. Simon Quinn of Imperial College London and CEPR and Tom Schwantje of Bocconi University were...

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), wh...

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 Gi...

Recorded at the CEPR Annual Forum in Paris. Many of the Trump administration policies have direct consequences for Europe. Some of them are directly targeted at Europe. So how should Europe respond?  The CEPR Press book The Economic Consequences of the Second Trump Administration covers this in up-to-the-minute detail. In Paris Tim Phillips spoke to two of the editors, Beatrice Weder di Mauro and...

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