VoxTalks Economics

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...

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 e...

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 D...

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...

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 o...

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...

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 th...

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...