VoxTalks Economics

S9 Ep54: Does sacking the manager work?

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 Ou

S9 Ep53: Lessons from Populism in Latin America

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 autho

S9 Ep52: The Dollar Anchor Is Slipping

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. Tare

S9 Ep51: Fiscal Populism and Monetary Policy

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,

S9 Ep50: Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Exchange Rate

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 episod

S9 Ep49: Combatting sexual harassment in the military

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 c

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

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 bu

S9 Ep47: The Next Generation: PSE 2026

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 microphon

S9 Ep46: Absorbing shocks since 1891

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 interes

S9 Ep45: Tariff Confusion

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, 5

S9 Ep44: How superpowers shape trade

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

S9 Ep43: Navigating industrial policy

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

S9 Ep42: The Safety Paradox

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

S9 Ep41: Making teenagers read newspapers

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

S9 Ep40: Are net zero commitments greenwash?

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 cor

S9 Ep39: Europe in 2050

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

S9 Ep38: Europe in the Middle

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 Po

S9 Ep37: Addressing Global Imbalances

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 imba

S9 Ep36: Helping the over-50s find work

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

S9 Ep35: The success of the embedded state

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 labo