S8 Ep57: How to make carbon removal work
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 Scientif...
20m Nov 07, 2025
20m
S8 Ep56: The economics of biodiversity
"The Economics of Biodiversity” was published by the UK Treasury in 2021. It sets out how economic systems value biodiversity and natural capital, and which policies would preserve and restore nature. The project leader was Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta of the University of Cambridge. In the latest of our special episodes recorded at the first Hoffmann Centre / CEPR / ReCIPE Conference continu...
34m Nov 05, 2025
34m
S8 Ep55: Overcoming climate agenda fatigue
Can COP 30 get the green transition back on track? It’s not a great time for international cooperation right now and, with hindsight, was the period from 2017 to 2022 a “golden moment” the climate transition, and was it an opportunity missed? That’s the argument presented by Livio Stracca, Deputy Director General Financial Stability at the European Central Bank, also the chair of NGFS work on ...
20m Oct 31, 2025
20m
S8 Ep54: Coalitions of the willing
In the first of our special episodes from the first Hoffmann Centre / CEPR / ReCIPE Conference, we’re discussing what chances there are of significant multilateral agreements being signed at COP 30 and, given that the chances are low, what plan B might be. Beatrice Weder di Mauro of CEPR, Hoffmann Centre and the Geneva Graduate Institute tells Tim Phillips that, if everyone can’t agree, then c...
26m Oct 29, 2025
26m
S8 Ep53: The visual politics of Brexit
A decade ago, the UK voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. It was the culmination of years of partisan arguments over membership. During that time, most newspapers in the UK took strong “leave” or “remain” positions in the stories they wrote. But were they less obviously partisan in their choice of pictures too? Wanyu Chung of University of Birmingham and CEPR was one of a team of ...
20m Oct 24, 2025
20m
S8 Ep52: A hundred lessons from history
The International Macroeconomic History Online Seminar Series, hosted by CEPR, is turning 100 this month — not years, but episodes. What began as a lockdown experiment has become a global fixture for anyone who believes economics never forgets. In a special edition of VoxTalks Economics, Tim Phillips talks with organisers Nathan Sussman and Rui Esteves of the Geneva Graduate Institute about the...
31m Oct 17, 2025
31m
S8 Ep51: A European Carbon Central Bank
In the second of our episodes based on the topics discussed at the conference “Addressing the Risks and Responses to Climate Overshoot”, organised by the AXA Research Fund, CEPR, and Paris School of Economics, Tim Phillips talks to Matthias Kalkuhl of the University of Potsdam about how to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The innovative technologies that might be able to do this in the future...
22m Oct 10, 2025
22m
S8 Ep50: The hidden cost of invasive species
In the first of two podcasts recorded at the conference “Addressing the Risks and Responses to Climate Overshoot”, organised by the AXA Research Fund, CEPR, and Paris School of Economics, Tim Phillips talks to Franck Courchamp of the University of Paris-Saclay about an aspect of climate change that is rarely talked about, increasingly important, and very costly. When plants or animals move, or...
21m Oct 03, 2025
21m
S8 Ep49: Tastes, geography, and culture
It’s cultural meme that teenagers in New York and Seoul will have more in common with each other than with their parents. Has where we come from been downgraded as an influence on what we like, or is there still what Thierry Mayer of Sciences Po and CEPR calls “gravity in tastes”? His research focuses on a very important aspect of this question: regional French food. Is there still a France of...
30m Sep 26, 2025
30m
S8 Ep48: What makes a successful entrepreneur?
We are up to our necks in advice about how to innovate in business, how to succeed as a founder, or how to spot a great startup. Blogs, YouTube channels and airport bookshops claim to reveal the secret. And yet, investors and incubators have a very patchy track record in picking winners. What if there was a better way to spot entrepreneurs who are more likely to succeed? Konrad Stahl of Univer...
19m Sep 19, 2025
19m
S8 Ep47: Misinformation and trust in news
Today generative AI makes it easy to create and distribute convincing fake news stories, pictures, even videos. We’ve all been hoodwinked – but does that undermine our trust and confidence in the mainstream media? Ruben Durante of National University of Singapore, IPF-ICREA and CEPR is one of the authors of new research that tests how AI-generated misinformation affects our desire for real new...
20m Sep 12, 2025
20m
S8 Ep46: Is Davos more than a boondoggle?
The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, attended by thousands of business and policy VIPs – is one of those events that pops up on the news every year, as we see photos of multinational CEOs shaking hands with world leaders and taking part in panel discussions on the future of the planet. But how valuable is it to the business people who pay hundreds of thousands of Swiss Fran...
18m Sep 05, 2025
18m
S8 Ep45: The stickiness of gender biased norms
The belief that women are in some way inferior to men has been around for centuries. And throughout that time, women have suffered the consequences. Economists have lately been trying to understand more about the origins of gender biased norms, to help create better policies to challenge them. Their work can build on insights from sociology, anthropology and gender studies, but also raises impo...
23m Aug 29, 2025
23m
S8 Ep44: In coin we trust
On 4 August, Paul Atkins, the chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, launched “Project Crypto”. The SEC wants to make the US “the crypto capital of the world”. Crypto investors make a lot of noise, but who are they, and do they behave differently to other retail investors? A new CEPR discussion paper called “Do you even crypto, bro?” summarises what a representative sample of US c...
28m Aug 22, 2025
28m
S8 Ep43: Strategic cops and robbers
How do criminals choose the weapons they carry, the number of accomplices, the types of business they target? Economists have long argued that decisions to commit economic crimes are strategic, based on a calculation of risk and reward. The Italian justice system changes the punishment for a crime depending on how it is committed, and so a new analysis of thieves and their crimes, based on dat...
23m Aug 15, 2025
23m
S8 Ep42: Carcillo: Closing the gender wage gap
Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025. The gender wage gap in advanced economies isn’t shrinking. What can firms do to eliminate the part of the wage gap that comes from discrimination? The OECD has analysed the data from countries with pay transparency legislation to discover how much of the gender pay gap arises from the different treatment of equally qualified men and women. Stéph...
19m Aug 08, 2025
19m
S8 Ep41: Bertrand: Why Japanese men don’t take paternity leave
Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025. One of the mysteries for economists and policymakers has been the reluctance of men to take paternity leave, no matter how generous the terms offered to them. In her presentation, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago Booth School mentioned some new research from Japan that is helping to shine a light on this topic, in an innovative and...
15m Aug 06, 2025
15m
S8 Ep40: Petrongolo: Gender and the labour market
From our series recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025. How much progress have we made in finding out the source of gender inequality at work? At the Forum, Barbara Petrongolo of the University of Oxford and CEPR gave the keynote lecture on “Questions and challenges for 21st century labour markets”. In conversations with Tim Phillips, she points out that there are still many unanswere...
25m Aug 01, 2025
25m
S8 Ep39: The next generation: PSE ’25
Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025. This week, we interview three of the next generation of economists. At the forum, a group of young researchers were presenting their work in the main theatre and at poster sessions during the breaks. Tim Phillips took the opportunity to talk to some of them about their research. Pelin Ozgul of the University of Maastricht has investigated wheth...
33m Jul 25, 2025
33m
S8 Ep38: The state of globalisation
Are global economic flows collapsing, or are they reorganising? That’s one of the intriguing questions asked by a new CEPR publication called The State of Globalisation. It brings together a series of essays on both the changes that are happening in the global economy, and the policies that can respond to these changes. So how should trade policy and industrial strategy adapt when globalization...
29m Jul 23, 2025
29m
S8 Ep37: The effect of working from home on house prices
Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025. Now that many of us work part or all our week at home, does that mean we want to move to a different area, or a larger house? And what is the effect on housing for those who cannot work from home? Morgane Richard of Stanford has researched how Londoners sought out new homes post-Covid to match their flexible work arrangements. She tells Tim Phil...
21m Jul 18, 2025
21m
S8 Ep36: Davis: Will working from home stick?
Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025. Go back six or seven years and working from home was an exception. Bosses discouraged it, contracts didn’t mention it, and we didn’t have the technology to do it. Covid changed all that. But since then, how have work patterns changed? Should we believe the press reports that we’re all being summoned back to the office, or is remote work now par...
19m Jul 16, 2025
19m
S8 Ep35: The global impact of AI
If we focus on the cutting edge of AI implementation, we’re also focusing on a small set of technologically advanced countries. How will AI affect work in the rest of the world, what should those countries do to prepare, and how can they make best use of the technology? Giovanni Melina of the IMF is one of the authors of two papers that calculates both the exposure of jobs to AI around the worl...
19m Jul 11, 2025
19m
S8 Ep34: How good are LLMs at doing our jobs?
 In the second of special series recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025, we are asking, how good is AI at doing real-world job task? And how can we measure their capability without resorting to technical benchmarks that may not mean much in the workplace? Since we all became aware of large language models, LLMs scientists have been attempting to evaluate how good they are at performin...
18m Jul 09, 2025
18m
S8 Ep33: Autor: Automation and the value of expertise
Recorded live at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2025. This year the annual Paris School of Economics-PSE Policy Forum is organized around three themes: artificial intelligence and labour reallocation, working conditions and remote work, and inequality in the workplace. In short, what's work going to look like in the future? Our series of podcasts, recorded live at the event, starts with David Auto...
30m Jul 04, 2025
30m
S8 Ep32: Bonus episode: From soft landings to hard realities
The Bank for International Settlements Annual Economic Report has just dropped, and there’s a markedly less positive tone than last year, when it was celebrating imminent soft landings in the global economy. It warns of a deteriorating outlook for growth, coupled with vulnerabilities in the global financial system. So, what exactly is the BIS worried about, how can policy and regulation respon...
32m Jun 29, 2025
32m
S8 Ep31: Does better school management boost test scores?
Whether you are looking at the link from education to economic growth, household earnings or individual happiness, there’s no doubt that a better-educated population is good news. But how can policy improve education in a cost-effective way? You might assume that a good route would be to improve the management of schools, but existing research is not conclusive, and often top-down attempts to i...
24m Jun 27, 2025
24m
S8 Ep30: Do car bans hurt politicians?
Pedestrianised areas, car-free streets, or low traffic neighbourhoods are increasingly visible in major cities. Whether in London, Paris, New York or Barcelona, these changes are always controversial – but does the loud criticism that we often hear in social media or newspapers really represent the views of voters who are affected by these policies? Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal of the Universita...
28m Jun 20, 2025
28m
S8 Ep29: Finding meaning at work
What’s the point of having a job? Clearly, to make money for ourselves and our families. But is it possible for us to discover some bigger purpose or meaning at work. And, if we do, who benefits? That’s the idea that a multinational organisation had when it called in a team of economists to analyse its internal programme called “Find your Purpose” (FYP). The resulting RCT set out to measure whe...
19m Jun 13, 2025
19m
S8 Ep28: How to curb the bias against female experts
Does the public take more notice of the opinions of male or female economists? We know that female experts, whether in science, politics or the media, suffer from an authority gap: their expertise is often not given as much weight by the public as opinions held by less qualified men. But does the gap persist for the very highest achievers? And, if it closes or even reverses for them, what lesso...
26m Jun 06, 2025
26m
S8 Ep27: The Grievance Doctrine
What if trade policy wasn’t really about trade at all? What if it was about revenge, power, and punishment, tariffs as tantrums and diplomacy as drama? You won’t find the Grievance Doctrine in economics textbooks, but there is one book that explains what it is, what its policies are, and the way it is currently being implemented. Richard Baldwin of IMD Business School in Lausanne, the founder a...
29m May 30, 2025
29m
S8 Ep26: The rise of China in academic research
China’s growth as an economic superpower has been based in a large part on its increasing ability to design and manufacture sophisticated, hi-tech goods. But, until recently, it was far from a superpower when it came to creating new knowledge and cutting-edge academic research. Luc Laeven of the ECB and CEPR and his co-authors recently published an analysis of the research output in top journal...
30m May 23, 2025
30m
S8 Ep25: Growth and trust in government
Does economic growth inspire us to trust our governments? A new paper finds a surprisingly strong and consistent relationship between trust and economic growth – not for this quarter, or this year, but over our lifetimes. Tim Besley of the London School of Economics tells Tim Phillips how we can measure trust in a government around the world, and the strong and consistent relationship between l...
26m May 16, 2025
26m
S8 Ep24: Do friendships change our political opinions?
Recently, students all over the world have been demonstrating in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza or in support of the policies of the Israeli government. At times, police have been required to keep the two sides apart. Protests, sit-ins and encampments are scenes familiar on many campuses. Sciences Po in Paris, is one of the locations where protests have made national news. But a decade ag...
19m May 09, 2025
19m
S8 Ep23: What is geoeconomics?
With the major geopolitical powers squaring up to each other, tariffs on trade and political turmoil, is it time for economics to focus more on the consequences for the world economy of great power rivalry? A new paper defines the emerging field of geoeconomics, reviews the existing research, and sets out an agenda to fill the gaps in what we know. Christoph Trebesch of the Kiel Institute for t...
23m May 02, 2025
23m
S8 Ep22: Do superstar advisors create star students?
Getting accepted to an elite PhD programme with a superstar advisor seems like “making it” if you want a research career in economics. But is it? How productive will those young, talented economists become? Half of elite economics PhDs from programmes at MIT, Harvard, Stanford and similar institutions publish next to nothing in the six years after they get their doctorate, and only 10% publish ...
23m Apr 25, 2025
23m
S8 Ep21: A meaningful life
What gives a life meaning? Is it about health, friends, family or something else? Do rich people have more meaningful lives than poor people? Do we find meaning in success or problems and failures too? During the Great Depression, the US Government Federal Writers’ Project dispatched a team of writers across the US with a simple brief: talk to people about their lives. The archive that they cre...
24m Apr 18, 2025
24m
S8 Ep20: Expelling the experts
President Trump, aided by DOGE under Elon Musk, promised deep cuts to the US federal bureaucracy. In these cases, and many others in recent history, populist politicians complain about a bloated and unelected “administrative state” that they inherit from a previous regime. They say these public employees frustrate their ability to deliver on their promises. Others argue that a bureaucracy conta...
22m Apr 11, 2025
22m
S8 Ep19: Central banks as financial agents of the state
Central banks play a crucial role in modern economies, managing money supply, setting interest rates, and ensuring financial stability. But their relationship with governments, particularly their role as financial agents of the state, creates potential risks that could threaten economic stability. Does the way central banks are structured and operate obscure the true fiscal health of the state,...
26m Apr 04, 2025
26m
S8 Ep18: When our values clash at work
Do you and your boss see the world in the same way and how does that affect your performance at work? You might not agree with your boss about everything. But if you and your boss don’t have the same outlook, does this mean you will be less productive? Alexia Delfino of Bocconi University measured both the values and the performance of employees at a global bank. She tells Tim Phillips whether ...
26m Mar 28, 2025
26m
S8 Ep17: The menopause penalty at work
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. The menopause can be a huge biological shock to women, but there has been almost no research into the consequences for their working lives. A new study uses administrative data from Norway and Sweden to discover the consequences of the menopause, both for health and for earnings. Rita Ginja of the university of Bergen tells Tim Phillips about the surprising...
19m Mar 21, 2025
19m
S8 Ep16: The next generation: Paris ‘24
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. Whenever economists gather, you will find many of tomorrow’s best economists too. They get a rare chance to present their research, and traditionally we like to ask three of them to talk to us about it too. In this episode, Tim Phillips talks to three more young researchers about their work – and about how economics can do better. Matyas Molnar of Central E...
27m Mar 14, 2025
27m
S8 Ep15: Ending period stigma in schools
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. Everywhere in the world there is still a stigma around periods. That can lead to bullying or exclusion in schools. Girls are stressed, and that affects their ability to study. In Madagascar, an RCT set out to end the stigma by discussing menstruation openly and seeking out Young Girl Leaders who could help their peers understand what was happening, and why ...
16m Mar 05, 2025
16m
S8 Ep14: The laws that protected women from work
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. During the first half of the 20th century, the US introduced state laws that imposed restrictions on when and how women were permitted to work outside the home. These laws seem bizarre in 2025. Why were they introduced – and why were they eventually repealed? In the first of three episodes to celebrate International Women’s Day, Tim Phillips talks to Anne H...
15m Feb 28, 2025
15m
S8 Ep13: The class gap in career progression
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. Recent research shows that our sex and race still affect our life chances. New evidence investigates whether class is still important in one profession that's close to home: academia. Anna Stansbury of MIT talks to Tim Phillips about what we mean when we talk about class, how it affects the careers of academics who get their PhDs from the top universities i...
17m Feb 26, 2025
17m
S8 Ep12: Do we work harder when we work from home?
It seems like many more of us have been working from home for at least part of the week. But bosses fret about the effect on productivity when their employees are out of sight. And we’re increasingly hearing about companies who are demanding that their staff to return to the office for four, or even five, days a week. Alessandra Fenizia of George Washington University talks to Tim Phillips abou...
18m Feb 21, 2025
18m
S8 Ep11: How should the EU respond to Trump?
It is now a month since President Trump’s inauguration, and it’s fair to say that a lot has happened already. In a special episode we talk to Moreno Bertoldi of ISPI and Marco Buti of EUI about how the EU can be smart when imposing reciprocal tariffs, whether the US economic agenda and the EU’s growth strategy are sustainable – and how the EU can maintain a united front in response to a looming...
29m Feb 18, 2025
29m
S8 Ep10: Who should work, and how much?
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. Do the most productive people work more or less than others? It’s a question that is constantly asked in economics, not least because the available data that compares the differences in working hours between rich and poor countries, or the same country over time, often seems to confound our expectations. Jonna Olsson tells Tim Phillips about how a simple mo...
15m Feb 14, 2025
15m
S8 Ep9: A European climate bond
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. Europe faces a gigantic climate investment gap. Can an EU climate debt financing scheme help to close it? To do this, Irene Monasterolo and her co-authors are proposing the joint issuance of climate bonds by the European Stability Mechanism, funded by selling greenhouse gas emission allowances via the ETS. She talks to Tim Phillips about what this would mea...
17m Feb 12, 2025
17m
S8 Ep8: Can planting trees change the climate?
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. At COPs or the WEF, we regularly hear about ambitious tree-planting initiatives. These massive programs have been praised as a way to motivate entire communities to join the fight against climate change, but do we know what their impact on the environment or the economy would be? An ingenious piece of research that evaluates a century-old environmental poli...
17m Feb 07, 2025
17m