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, twenty million claims, and fifty-five million examiner decisions, they...

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 prices? Digitalisation might finally make that approach viable at scale. Price stability, by design.

Will we...

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 find that governments almost never cut social spending when they rearm; they expand both military and welfare budgets simultaneously. The bill arrives later...

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 expect.

Tommaso Frattini of the University of Milan, one...

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 lived, did not permit it. Thirteen American states currently allow medical assistance in dying; most require a term...

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 empirical account of how government-funded innovation has shaped US productivity since the Second World War. The headline r...

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 Paris Report, published jointly by CEPR and Bruegel, examining China's structural imbalances from the inside. His argument: the same po...

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 a dollar stablecoin, they are effectively buying into a US T-bill at zero i...

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 written a chapter in the fourth Paris Report, published jointly by CEPR and B...

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 Cold War; US tariffs and Chinese export controls are lodged...

"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 assets, a move that could free up roughly £30 billion of capital across the UK banking system. Aikman and Vickers see no c...

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 of the far-right social network Parler also increased participation. But political isolation amplified the movement: the communities most over-represented among those who traveled to...

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 much of that promise has held. 

Bruno talks to Tim Phillips about blockchain’s potential, its flaws, and its future.  

It i...

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 it offsets the diminishing returns that have historically stopped self-improving processes from compounding. Three reinforcing feedback loops: software quality, hardware...

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 history. The ruble was in freefall; banning cash withdrawals and forcing exporters to hand over foreign currency revenues stopped the crisis. The measures worked because Russia kept earning export income, and the sanctions...

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 pressure. What they find is not what you might expect. Aggregate matching efficiency fell by only about 15%; less than the decline recorded in the United States during the 2008 financial crisis. Firms hired women into roles previously closed t...

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 question is not simply how to repair what was there: it is whether repairing what was there is the right goal.

Edward Glaeser of Harvard, Martina Kirchberger of Trinity College Dublin, and Andrii Parkhomenko of...

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 – is not just politically defensible but economically essential for attracting private investment. 

The bill for rebuilding and growing Ukraine, Gorodnichenko estimates, is $40 billion a year: $20 billion to replace destroyed capital, $10 billion to stop Ukraine falling behind its Eastern European peers, and $...

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 two of the researchers. They tell Tim Phillips about why it is important to develop better managers, and how we might do that for young professionals.

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), whose research tracks the impact of sex segregation in French elementary schools; Alishuba Philip of the University of Zurich, who has investigated why slum redevelopment often doesn’t ben...

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 Giving’s programme on economic growth in low- and middle-income countries and is one of the authors in a chapter on this topic in the recent CEPR book, The Economic Consequences of the Second...

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 Ugo Panizza of the Graduate Institute Geneva, president and vice president of CEPR. Both have strong views about the challenge to Europe, and how Europe should meet that challenge.

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 Maastricht University to talk about their work on the macroeconomic impact of longevity.

After Liberation Day, the dollar fell by 6%. We would usually expect tariffs to send exchange rates in the other direction. So what happened?

In another episode recorded at the CEPR Annual Symposium in Paris, Giancarlo Corsetti tells Tim Phillips about new research that shows how exchange rates are responding to US tariffs since 2018. When tariffs are expected and retaliation is swift, he argues, then market reactions reflect a repricing of long-run risk, rather than the text-book response we might expect.

In 2025, the trade story was about tariffs. And that story isn’t over. Does anyone know what happens next? 

Richard Baldwin of IMD Business School and CEPR was author of the chapter on tariffs in the CEPR Press book The Economic Consequences of The Second Trump Administration, and also of The Great Trade Hack, published by CEPR press in 2025. Gene Grossman of Princeton and CEPR analysed the legality of the Trump tariffs in a recent CEPR discussion paper.

So, at the CEPR Symposium in Paris, Tim Phillips asked both of them: What happens next?

D...

Another special episode recorded at the CEPR annual symposium in Paris.

When does the level of debt in the US become a problem for the economy, and for ordinary Americans? And when it does, what are the policy options to fix it?

That’s the topic of a Chapter in the CEPR book. The authors are Ugo Panizza of the Graduate Institute, Geneva and CEPR, and Antonio Fatás of INSEAD and CEPR. They talk to Tim Phillips about how recent policy – notably the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – is blowing up US debt and warn th...

Stablecoins are digital tokens, pegged to a fiat currency. What could possibly go wrong?

For one type of stablecoin the answer is: plenty, according to Richard Portes. The founder and honorary president of CEPR is also co-chair of the European Systemic Risk Board Crypto Asset Task Force. In this role he has been investigating the risks of multi-issuer stablecoins in Europe. He tells Tim Phillips that, if one of these stablecoins hit trouble, US holders could use European regulation to recover their investment from the coin’s European reserves. And that, he argues, would be a threat to...

In another of our special episodes recorded at the CEPR annual Symposium, we ask: is it time for Europe to rearm?

The message from the US could not be clearer: it is time for European countries to take care of their own security. If Europe decides to rearm, it has the industrial base – but Moritz Schularick of the Kiel Institute and CEPR warns that it isn’t converting that capacity into credible deterrence. 

Tim Phillips asks him what European rearmament could mean in practice: not just scaling up production but buying smarter and investing in next...

In another of our episodes recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium, we ask: When Gen AI can do an undergraduate’s problem set in seconds, how should teaching, and the syllabus, respond? 

Who better to answer this than Wendy Carlin of UCL and CEPR? Wendy – who has recently become Dame Wendy – was at the symposium to talk about her project to change economics teaching through the CORE Project, which more than 500 institutions use to teach introductory economics in a way that flips the standard textbook treatment on it head.

Recently Wendy and CORE have been working...

Another special episode recorded at the CEPR annual symposium in Paris. The Trump administration says it wants America to lead in AI, but what does that mean in practice for trade and productivity? Will AI make growth great again, or just inflate a short-term capital spending boom?

Gary Gensler of MIT and CEPR (also a former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission) unpacks the administration’s AI action plan, helps us work out what's happening to export controls, and untangles the deal-making geopolitics of AI hardware. 

At the CEPR annual Symposium in Paris we sat down with Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a distinguished fellow of CEPR, and a global authority on geopolitics and trade to discuss the profound changes in the multilateral order in 2025, how countries will adjust to this new normal – and whether the changes we have seen will ever be unwound.

Who would be a policymaker right now? The list of economic problems that we need to solve ranges from “very difficult” to “existential”. An ambitious new book collects the ideas of many influential economists on how to approach these challenges. But can it avoid the mistakes of previous attempts to find an economic policy consensus?

Andrés Velasco and Tim Besley are two of the editors of The London Consensus. Tim Phillips joined them at The London School of Economics to ask why the book was created, how policymakers can use it, and whether we should be wary of econom...

Economic sanctions are the big geoeconomic bazooka. But what does history tell us about how well they work, and their relevance today. And does the theory match the data?

Moritz Schularick of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and CEPR talks to Tim Phillips about the evidence of the history of sanctions on what they can achieve, whether we expect too much too soon from small sanctions – and whether politicians are prepared to impose the sanctions that bite.

Biodiversity is essential for the wide range of economic activities that our planet needs. Yet, the economic consequences of its global decline are hard to estimate, because most population studies focus on individual species in isolation.

Frederik Noack of the University of British Columbia argues that this misses a central insight about biodiversity: a healthy environment depends not just on individual species, but also on the way they work together to keep our natural environment in balance. One especially important aspect of this is the way that birds help keep crops safe from pests and reduce the need...

In 2021, at COP26, the International Accounting Standards Board announced it would create a standard for this reporting.

It wants to integrate sustainability reporting with traditional IFRS accounting. Should firms be compelled by regulators to disclose their impact on the climate in their corporate reporting? Investors value convergence in sustainability reporting standards, but they are facing stiff opposition both in the US and Europe – even while developing economies embrace the new regime.

Lucrezia Reichlin of the London Business School and CEPR talked to Tim Phillips on the progress to sustainability standards, the scope of reporting, who wants it...

In Europe and beyond, populist politicians continue to gain ground. What message are voters sending? Are politicians from other parties listening, and explaining their policies in a way that will successfully reach supporters of populist parties?

There are one set of policies for which this may be a huge problem soon. What does this mean for that those tricky choices that politicians will have to make when dealing with the consequences of climate change, and sustainability?

Sergei Guriev of London Business School and Catherine de Vries of Bocconi University have both examined what is driving support...

Our economy is embedded in nature, but nature is in danger. External funding is needed, especially in the Global South, to support the conservation of our natural ecosystems. Markets can play a role, but the way in which voluntary carbon markets do this has low public trust which, from recent news, may be deserved.

Estelle Cantillon of Université libre de Bruxelles and CEPR tells Tim Phillips about her proposal for a new market mechanism to channel funds to projects that will conserve or restore our natural environment by paying dividends to those who invest. But how will it a...

“What is needed is non-marginal, transformative change to shift the economy, technology, and society”. That’s the typically forthright recommendation from Rick van der Ploeg of the University of Oxford and University of Amsterdam for how to ensure that climate policy is effective at changing our habits and behaviour. He argues that the gradual changes in habits that current policies target don’t go far enough, and that we run the risk of backsliding. But what does this mean in practice? Rick spoke to Tim Phillips about what policies to push, when to push them – and how big the push needs to b

We are familiar with climate policy to reduce emissions. We know about the policies to adapt to climate change. But can we successfully reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and how do we create policies and incentives to invest in, and take advantage of, those technologies?

Ottmar Edenhofer, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and chair of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, talks to Tim Phillips about an aspect of climate policy that is becoming increasingly important.