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Learn about groundbreaking new research, commentary and policy ideas from the world's leading economists. Presented by Tim Phillips.
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- 3 days ago25 min
S9 Ep55: Loosening inheritance law
In most of the world you do not get to choose who inherits your money. Across continental Europe, Latin America, and countries governed by Islamic law, a minimum share of your estate will be reserved for your children, your spouse, and in some places your surviving parents. Write a will that ignores them and the law overrules you. If you want a head start in life, choose your parents carefully.Switzerland changed the rules in January 2023. The compulsory share for children fell by one third and the share reserved for surviving parents disappeared altogether. In this week's VoxTalk, Marius Brülhart (University of Lausanne, CEPR) tells Tim Phillips how he had been following the reform with no way of observing its effects, until a website that helps Swiss people write their wills online offered him its anonymous data. People who were handed more freedom gave less to their children and their parents, and more to spouses and partners. About one third of every liberated franc went to recipients outside the family altogether. Liberalising the law spreads wealth without taxing anyone: politically, though maybe not democratically, attractive. The research behind this episode:Brulhart, Marius, and Laia Soler. 2026. "Unfree Wills: Inheritance Rules, Bequest Motives, and Wealth Diffusion." CEPR Discussion Paper 21811. The CEPR version is gated.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Marius Brulhart. 2026. "Loosening inheritance law." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).About the guestMarius Brulhart is Professor of Economics at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research spans public finance, regional and urban economics, and international trade, with a long-running interest in how Swiss taxpayers and testators respond to the rules they are given. He has advised the World Bank, the OECD, the European Commission, and the Swiss government.Research cited in this episodeProtected heirs. Swiss law, like that of most civil-law countries, reserves compulsory minimum shares of an estate for close family. Before 2023 those categories were children and other direct descendants, spouses, and surviving parents. An unmarried testator with children could freely allocate only 25% of their estate; the rest belonged to the children by law.The 2023 reform. Parliament passed the change in December 2020 and it came into force on 1 January 2023. Minimum shares for direct descendants were cut by one third, those for surviving parents were abolished, and the share reserved for a surviving spouse was left alone. Averaged across family types in the data, the freely attributable portion of an estate rose by 19 percentage points, from 39% to 58%.DeinAdieu.ch. The Swiss online service that generated the data, funded by charities seeking legacies. Users answer questions about their family situation, the tool limits their choices to what the law allows, and they set the shares with a set of sliders. The sample covers 16,887 completed forms submitted between January 2020 and March 2024, which straddles the reform.Bunching. Before the reform, a large share of testators gave their protected heirs exactly the legal minimum and not a franc more; 52% of testators with children and 72% of those with living parents had been giving more than they wanted to. When the minimum fell, so did their allocations.Reference dependence. The whole distribution moved, not just the people who had been pinned to the legal floor. Testators who had voluntarily given their children more than the law required also gave less after the reform, which suggests the legal minimum works as a mental benchmark for generosity even when it is not binding.Marginal diffusion propensity. Brulhart and Soler's term for the share of each newly discretionary franc that goes to nonrelatives and charities. Their central estimate is 0.33. Applied to the whole population it implies that the reform moved more wealth outside family dynasties than Switzerland's inheritance taxes do, though Swiss inheritance tax is unusually light, with children inheriting tax free in most cantons.More VoxTalks Economics episodesWealth Taxes. Marius Brulhart's earlier conversation with Tim Phillips, on what Switzerland's cantons reveal about how people respond when wealth rather than income is taxed.Political inequality. Julia Cagé on what concentrated wealth does to democratic politics, which is the other
- 1 weeks ago18 min
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 Ours (Erasmus School of Economics, CEPR, Feyenoord fan) has looked at seven seasons of the Dutch top flight and 31 managers who were sacrificed mid-season. To work out whether any of them deserved it, he uses bookmaker odds and expected goals to distinguish bad play from bad luck. The new-manager bounce is real: results improve after a new manager walks in. But also, not real: clubs that don't sack the manager have an upturn too. The message for the boardroom, in football and business, is that not doing anything might often be the best course of action.The research behind this episode:van Ours, Jan C. 2026. "Dust in the Wind: Causes and Consequences of Managerial Replacements." CEPR Discussion Paper DP21850, Centre for Economic Policy Research. The paper is gated.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Jan van Ours. 2026. "Does sacking the manager work?" VoxTalks Economics (podcast).About the guestJan van Ours is Emeritus Professor of Applied Economics at Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a core member of the Erasmus Centre for Applied Sports Economics. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Center for Health Economics, Monash Business School, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research spans unemployment dynamics, labour market policy, health and well-being, and the economics of professional sport, where match data offer a rare chance to watch a labour market in the open.Research cited in this episodeThe Eredivisie sample. Seven seasons of the top league of Dutch professional football, from 2018/19 to 2024/25, covering 4,136 match observations and 126 club-seasons. In that period 31 managers were replaced during a season; about 15% had gone by mid-season and 25% by the end of it.Points surprise. The cumulative gap, from the first match of the season, between the points a club has won and the points the bookmakers implied it should have won. Bookmaker odds are used as the benchmark because they already contain everything the market knows about squad quality, home advantage and the opposition; van Ours confirms this in the data, finding that recent results add nothing to the odds as a predictor of the next match.Performance surprise. The same cumulative gap, but measured with expected points derived from expected goals rather than actual results. Points surprise catches a club that is losing. Performance surprise catches a club that is playing badly. A club can be one without being the other, which is how luck gets separated from ability.Expected goals. The probability that a given shot becomes a goal, estimated from thousands of comparable attempts and conditioned on the distance and angle of the shooter, the body part used, and the type of pass and attack. Van Ours converts expected goals scored and conceded into a distribution of match outcomes, and from that into expected points. His data come from fbref.com; the paper notes that match-level expected goals were discontinued in January 2026 after a dispute between fbref and Opta.The counterfactual replacement. The device that carries the paper. For each actual sacking, van Ours searches the same club in a different season for a moment when the sum of points surprise and performance surprise was almost identical, and the manager survived. Of the 31 replacements, 22 have a counterfactual, 19 of them unique. Clubs that sacked the manager gained 0.21 points per match afterwards. Clubs in the same trouble that did not sack the manager gained 0.38.Scapegoating. William Gamson and Norman Scotch set out the idea in "Scapegoating in baseball" in the American Journal of Sociology in 1964, describing the sacking of a manager as an anxiety-reducing ritual that participants treat as an improvement whether or not anything improves. Van Ours returns to it to explain why a decision with no measurable effect keeps being taken.Managers in regular firms. Stuart Gilson's 1989 study in the Journal of Financial Economics found that replaced executives were not employed by another firm for at least three years. Football managers are frequently back in work within weeks, which is one reason the job pays what it does. Hilger, Mankel and Richter reviewed 91 studies of top executive dismissals published between 1960 and 2010 and concluded that the effects of managerial turnover are not statistically different from zero.<
- 2 weeks ago33 min
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 authors of a new paper that traces populist governments across Latin America back to 1970. He argues that they follow a strikingly similar script: they expand spending, weaken the institutions built to restrain them, and ride the wave until inflation catches up with them. But the most recent generation of leaders -- Chávez and Maduro, the Kirchners, Correa, and Morales -- lasted longer than their predecessors. Why?The research behind this episode:Magud, Nicolás E., Antonio Spilimbergo, and Alejandro Werner. 2026. "Lessons from Populism in Latin America." Paper presented at the second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues Conference, June 2026. Forthcoming in Economic Policy.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Alejandro Werner. 2026. "Lessons from Populism in Latin America." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).About the guestAlejandro Werner is the founding director of the Georgetown Americas Institute and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He spent nine years as director of the International Monetary Fund's Western Hemisphere Department, and earlier held senior posts at Mexico's finance ministry and central bank. His research spans macroeconomic policy, fiscal sustainability, and financial crises across Latin America.Research cited in this episodeThe Global Populism Database, built by political scientist Kirk Hawkins and colleagues, codes the rhetoric of presidents and prime ministers on a scale from zero (not populist) to two (highly populist), reading inauguration and campaign speeches for anti establishment language, appeals to "the people," and simple, direct phrasing. Magud, Spilimbergo, and Werner use this index, rather than a leader's policies, to decide who counts as a populist, which keeps their definition independent of the outcomes they go on to measure.Dornbusch and Edwards' "macroeconomics of populism," from their 1991 edited volume of the same name, was the first systematic account of how Latin American leaders combine expansionary spending with price controls, and how the resulting shortages and capital flight bring the cycle to an end. The new paper tests whether that pattern still holds three decades on.Funke, Schularick and Trebesch (2023), published in the American Economic Review, built an alternative populism index from historical case studies rather than speeches, and found that populist leaders leave a drag on economic activity that can persist for up to fifteen years after they leave office. Werner and his coauthors use this index as a robustness check on their own results.Local projections, a method developed by the economist Oscar Jorda in 2005, trace how a variable such as inflation or the real exchange rate evolves in the years after a shock, in this case the arrival of a populist government, without imposing the structure of a full macroeconomic model.The commodity terms of trade windfall, a measure developed by Gustavo Adler and Magud, calculates the extra income a country earns when its export prices rise relative to its import prices. The paper uses this measure to show that the populist governments with the largest windfalls, including Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, stayed in power the longest.More VoxTalks Economics episodesFiscal Populism and Monetary Policy, recorded at the same EP conference, in which Magud talks to Tim Phillips about how a government's fiscal stance interacts with the credibility of its central bank.The Dollar Anchor Is Slipping, Tarek Hassan talks to Tim Phillips about what happens when the dollar's role as the world's safe asset comes under strain.Related reading on VoxEU.orgFour decades of terms of trade booms, a VoxEU column by Magud and Adler that introduces the income windfall measure used in this paper, and shows how much larger Latin America's most recent commodity boom was than those of the 1970s.Effects of commodity price windfalls on external debt: the role of political institutions</a
- 2 weeks ago26 min
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.Tarek Hassan (Boston University, CEPR), working with Thomas Mertens, Jingye Wang and Tony Zhang, has been investigating what makes a currency the global anchor. Being the world's biggest economy helps, but what really matters is how far an economy's shocks affect world prices. Tariffs reduce this effect. But are we near a tipping point, when the euro takes over as the global reserve currency? We might be closer than you think and, if a change happens, it might happen more quickly than you think too.This is the third of four episodes drawn from papers commissioned for the second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference, held in Venice on 19 and 20 June 2026 and organised by CEPR, CESifo and Sciences Po.The research behind this episode:Hassan, Tarek A., Thomas M. Mertens, Jingye Wang, and Tony Zhang. 2026. "Openness, Integration, and the International Monetary Order." Conference draft, presented at the 2nd Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues Conference, Venice, 19 to 20 June 2026. Forthcoming in Economic Policy.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Tarek A. Hassan. 2026. "The Dollar Anchor Is Slipping." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).About the guestTarek A. Hassan is Professor of Economics at Boston University, a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research spans international finance, macro-finance, and the political economy of growth, from measuring firm-level political risk with large language models to, in this paper, the size and openness that decide which currency the world treats as safe.Research cited in this episodeLiberation Day and the April 2025 tariffs. On 2 April 2025, the White House announced a sweeping set of import tariffs. Hassan and his co-authors treat the market reaction to that announcement, in which the dollar fell even as US interest rates rose and US stocks underperformed, as the anomaly their model is built to explain; a currency behaving that way in a crisis usually counts as risky, not safe. CEPR has gathered further commentary on the announcement and its aftermath on its Trump and Tariffs page.Exorbitant privilege. A term coined in the 1960s for the advantage the United States gets from issuing the world's reserve currency, since foreign investors will hold dollar assets at a lower return than they would demand elsewhere. Hassan uses it to explain why Americans can borrow more cheaply than almost anyone else, and why losing anchor status would raise the US government's own borrowing costs.Effective size. The paper's central idea. It is not simply how big an economy is, but how much weight its shocks carry in setting world prices, which depends on both actual size and openness to trade and capital flows. Tariffs and capital controls both reduce a country's effective size without touching its GDP, which is how they can knock a currency out of contention as a global anchor.The Budget Lab at Yale's tariff tracker. The paper draws its estimate that the current average tariff on US imports and exports, once retaliation is included, runs at around 12% from The Budget Lab at Yale (2025), Where We Stand: The Fiscal, Economic, and Distributional Effects of All US Tariffs Enacted in 2025 Through April 2, a running assessment of US trade policy maintained by the nonpartisan Budget Lab at Yale.Ilzetzki, Reinhart, and Rogoff's exchange rate classification. Ilzetzki, Reinhart, and Rogoff. 2019. "Exchange Arrangements Entering the Twenty-First Century: Which Anchor Will Hold?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 134 (2). This dataset classifies the de facto exchange rate regime of 141 economies. Hassan and his co-authors use it to calibrate their model and to show that the share of countries pegging tightly to the dollar falls with country size almost exactly as their theory predicts.The Chinn-Ito index of capital account openness. Chinn, Menzie D., and Hiro Ito. 2006. "What Matters for Financial Development? Capital Controls, Institutions, and Interactions." <
- 3 weeks ago16 min
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, the central bank it once tried to control is still flinching.Martín Uribe (Columbia) and Nicolás Magud (IMF) have investigated the long-run effect of populist governments that leaned on their central banks to print money and feed inflation. They find that these central banks raise interest rates more aggressively than others when inflation drifts above target, even decades later.This is the second of four episodes drawn from papers commissioned for the second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference, organised by CEPR, CESifo and Sciences Po.The research behind this episode:Jácome, Luis, Nicolás E. Magud, Samuel Pienknagura, and Martín Uribe. 2026. "Fiscal Populism and Monetary Policy Rules." Conference draft, presented at the 2nd Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues Conference, Venice, 19-20 June 2026. Forthcoming in Economic Policy.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, Martín Uribe, and Nicolás E. Magud. 2026. "Fiscal Populism and Monetary Policy." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).About the guestsMartin Uribe is the Robert A. Mundell Professor of Economics at Columbia University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research spans international macroeconomics and the theory of monetary and fiscal policy, with recent work on tariff shocks, fiscal dominance, and the long-run legacy of high inflation on how central banks set policy. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Economics.Nicolás E. Magud is a Senior Economist in the International Monetary Fund's Western Hemisphere Department. His research spans open-economy macroeconomics, with a focus on fiscal policy, exchange rates, capital flows, and capital controls, much of it drawn from Latin America's long experience of inflation and central bank reform.Research cited in this episodeThe populist leaders database. Funke, Manuel, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch. 2023. "Populist Leaders and the Economy." American Economic Review 113 (12): 3249-88. The authors classify a leader as populist if their rhetoric splits society into "the people" against "the elites," then divide populists into left-wing, whose target is economic elites, and right-wing, whose target is foreigners and minorities. Deficit monetisation and "unpleasant monetarist arithmetic." Sargent, Thomas J., and Neil Wallace. 1981. "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic." Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 5 (3). The paper that established the mechanism this episode turns on: when a government's deficit is financed by its own central bank printing money rather than by selling bonds to the public, the result is inflation. It gives the paper's account of populism and central bank credit its theoretical backbone.Local projections difference-in-differences. Dube, Arindrajit, Daniele Girardi, Oscar Jorda , and Alan M. Taylor. 2025. "A Local Projections Approach to Difference-in-Differences." Journal of Applied Econometrics 40 (7): 741-58. The statistical method behind the paper's headline charts. It compares countries that have just installed a populist government against "clean" control countries with no recent populist history, tracking central bank credit year by year after the change of regime.The Central Bank Independence Extended (CBIE) index. Romelli, Davide. 2022. "The Political Economy of Reforms in Central Bank Design: Evidence from a New Dataset." Economic Policy 37 (112): 641-88. A dataset scoring central bank laws on their independence, including limits on lending to government. The paper uses it to show that countries with a populist past, especially a left-wing one, now have stricter legal limits on central bank lending than countries with no such history.Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. The paper's three historical case studies. In Argentina, governments from Perón onward repeatedly rewrote central bank law to permit financing of the treasury, contributing to repeat
- 3 weeks ago24 min
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 episodes of Voxtalks based on papers presented at the second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference, Alfonso Merendino (Bocconi University) and Tommaso Monacelli (Bocconi University, CEPR) tell Tim Phillips what they found when they looked for reasons. Their conclusion: for tariffs, it's not size, it is how permanent people expect it to be. They call this structural trade policy uncertainty. When that uncertainty is low, a tariff behaves exactly as the textbook says. When it's high, the same tariff can weaken the currency, shrink output and pull down inflation instead.The research behind this episode:Merendino, Alfonso, and Tommaso Monacelli. 2026. "Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Exchange Rate." Conference draft, presented at the 2nd Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues Conference, Venice, 19-20 June 2026. Forthcoming in Economic Policy.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, Tommaso Monacelli, and Alfonso Merendino. 2026. "Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Exchange Rate." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).About the guestsTommaso Monacelli is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University and a Research Fellow of IGIER Bocconi and CEPR. His research spans international macroeconomics, monetary policy and the business cycle, with recent work on tariffs and monetary policy, supply chain uncertainty and inflation, and heterogeneous bank models of monetary transmission. He is co-editor of the Journal of International Economics and was managing co-editor of Economic Policy from 2016 to 2021.Alfonso Merendino is a PhD student in Economics at Yale University and a Research Fellow at the Social Economics Lab. He recently completed a research placement in macroeconomic modelling at the European Central Bank, and holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Economics from Bocconi University, where this paper was written.Research cited in this episodeStructural trade-policy uncertainty (S-TPU). The paper's central measure, capturing uncertainty not about the size of a tariff but about how persistent the trade-policy regime behind it will be. Merendino and Monacelli split observed US tariff rates from 1990 to 2025 into a persistent component and a short-lived transitory one, using a state-space model with separate volatility for each, and define S-TPU as the volatility of the persistent component.The 2017 US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The authors' example of a pure S-TPU shock. The withdrawal changed no tariff rate on impact, but it reshuffled expectations about the durability of US trade policy, and their index of structural uncertainty spikes at this point."Liberation Day" tariffs, April 2025. The sweeping tariff package announced by the Trump administration on 2 April 2025. The paper treats this, alongside the 2018 Section 301 tariffs on China, as one of two clearly identified tariff shocks used to anchor its statistical model.Aggregate trade-policy uncertainty index. Caldara, Dario, Matteo Iacoviello, Patrick Molligo, Andrea Prestipino, and Andrea Raffo. 2020. "The Economic Effects of Trade Policy Uncertainty." Journal of Monetary Economics 109: 38-59. This newspaper-based index of trade-policy uncertainty mixes announcement noise with genuine regime change; Merendino and Monacelli show that conditioning on it, rather than on their narrower S-TPU measure, erases the state-dependent pattern they document.Narrative-dominance identification. The technique the authors use to isolate tariff shocks in their statistical model, adapted from Juan Antolín-Díaz and Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez. 2018. "Narrative Sign Restrictions for SVARs." American Economic Review 108 (10). Rather than imposing a full statistical model, the method anchors identification to a small number of clearly documented policy events, such as the 2018 and 2025 tariff rounds, and lets everything else, including the sign of the exchange-rate response, be estimated freely from the data.More VoxTalks Economics episodesThe second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference follows the first, held in Paris in December 2025. Three earlier VoxTalks Economics episodes from th
- Aug 21, 202621 min
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 culture of that room turns out to be, they are stuck with it.We know that the military everywhere has a poor record on sexual harassment. Johanna Rickne (Stockholm University, CEPR) and her co-authors wanted to reduce its acceptance, and the number of incidents. Compulsory training, standing a in a room a showing a PowerPoint, has a poor record. It can even inspire a backlash. Instead, they included two pieces of information in a 20-minute enrolment survey. One fact was about how women score on the army's own end-of-service assessments. The other was about what last year's recruits really thought about crude sexual jokes. Eight weeks later, the researchers came back to see what had changed for the 949 recruits.The research behind this episode:Olle Folke, Torbjørn Hanson, Åshild A. Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, and Johanna Rickne. 2026. "Targeting Attitudes to Combat Sexual Harassment: A Randomized Intervention in the Norwegian Military." CEPR Discussion Paper 21475. The discussion paper is gated. It is also published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Johanna Rickne. 2026. "Combatting sexual harassment in the military." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).About the guestJohanna Rickne is Professor of Economics at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University, and holds part-time chairs at the University of Nottingham and the Stockholm School of Economics. She is affiliated with the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her research spans labour economics, political economics and gender economics, with sustained work on sexual harassment as a workplace hazard, on who ends up in political office, and on what makes work meaningful. She won the Assar Lindbeck Medal in 2023.Research cited in this episodeThe Sexual Experiences Questionnaire is the behavioural instrument used to measure prevalence here. Rather than asking people whether they were sexually harassed, a term that different people read very differently, it presents a list of specific behaviours and asks whether each one happened. The version used in Norway runs to 14 items and is adapted from the questionnaire developed for the US military.Gender harassment is one of three categories in the standard model of sexual harassment, alongside unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. It covers hostile or demeaning conduct based on someone's sex or gender that is not necessarily sexual in nature, including remarks that a person is not suited to the job. In this boot camp it was the most common behaviour reported by women.Backlash from compliance training is the reason the intervention avoids looking like training at all. Mark Roehling, Dongyuan Wu, Mahl Geum Choi and James Dulebohn's 2022 meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology gathers the evidence on what harassment training does and does not shift; other studies find that employees most inclined to harass become more tolerant of the behaviour after being told how to behave. Voluntary sessions have the opposite problem, in that those employees do not turn up.Misperceived social norms supply the mechanism for the second piece of information. Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra Gonzalez and David Yanagizawa-Drott's study of Saudi Arabian husbands showed that men privately supported their wives working outside the home while badly underestimating how many other men agreed; correcting the misperception changed what those men did. The boot camp version asks recruits what their predecessors thought about sexualised jokes, then tells them the answer.The Norwegian Armed Forces service statement is the source of the first piece of information. Recruits are assessed at the end of service on leadership, responsibility, collaboration, professional competence and judgement. Average scores show no gender gap; the graph was shown to the treated recruits in this experiment.The vignette holds the harassment event constant across everyone who answers. Recruits read a short scenario set in a room like their own and rate six statements about it, covering whether the conduct counts as harassment, what the woman should do, and what any bystanders owe her. Because the incident is fixed
- Aug 14, 202618 min
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 bus that used to reach the next town. Rural Japan is not simply ageing: it is emptying.Elisa Giannone (CREI, CEPR) and her co-authors have analysed Japan's 1,741 municipalities from 1980 onwards. The oldest quarter of them lost around 26% of their population by 2010; the youngest quarter grew by 22%, and the gap between them is still widening. Taxing city dwellers could reverse the trend. But that's a century-long policy, that would also lower national income per head by about 1.3%. There is no version of this without a bill attached, she warns.The research behind this episode:Giannone, Elisa, Yuhei Miyauchi, Nuno Paixão, Xinle Pang, and Yuta Suzuki. 2026. "Living in a Ghost Town: The Geography of Depopulation and Aging." CEPR Discussion Paper 21447 (gated).To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Elisa Giannone. 2026. "What price to save Japan's ghost towns?" VoxTalks Economics (podcast).About the guestElisa Giannone is a researcher at CREI, an Adjunct Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, an Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics. She works on internal migration, regional income divergence, the spatial consequences of local shocks and the question of why people move.Research cited in this episodeSocial and natural population change. Demographers separate population movements through migration, known as social change, from births and deaths, known as natural change. Giannone's team runs both counterfactuals separately. Shut down migration and the oldest municipalities still age, but the population loss between 1980 and 2010 falls from nearly 0.3 log points to under 0.1. The framework follows Stanley Smith, Jeff Tayman and David Swanson's standard treatment of state and local population projections.Scale economies in local public services. A 1% increase in local population is associated with a 0.53% fall in municipal government spending per head. Roads, schools, clinics and administration carry a large fixed cost, so the cost of serving each remaining resident rises as a town shrinks. This is the fiscal arithmetic that makes depopulation expensive.Consumption-equivalent flow utility. The paper's measure of quality of life, amenity-adjusted real income. It captures what the residents of a place can actually buy and enjoy rather than what they earn on paper, which matters when the shops and the doctors are leaving.The five oldest prefectures. Kochi, Shimane, Tokushima, Tottori and Yamagata, ranked by elderly share in 2015. They are the target group in every policy simulation, and their combined elderly share reaches nearly 60% by 2215 under the baseline projection.Municipal extinction. Hiroya Masuda's 2014 book Chiho Shometsu warned that unipolar concentration in Tokyo would drive hundreds of rural municipalities out of existence. It set the terms of Japan's regional revitalisation debate, and the paper's projections give that warning a number.United Nations World Population Prospects. Giannone's figures for the global picture, including the count of countries that have already passed peak population and those projected to do so by the mid 2050s, come from the UN projections rather than from the paper itself.More VoxTalks Economics episodesEconomic decline and the rise of populism. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose explains what happens politically in the places this episode watches emptying, and why long term regional decline shows up at the ballot box.Related reading on VoxEU.orgLiving in a ghost town: The geography of depopulation and ageing. The authors' own column, with the charts behind this episode.Japan's age wave: Challenges and solutions, a column by Andrew Stawasz, Paige Kirby, JP Sevilla and David Bloom on the national scale of the problem this episode breaks down by region.Mobile seniors and local economic development. Marco Badilla-Maroto, Benjamin Faber, Antoine Levy and Mathilde Munoz find that retirees moving into poorer French regions bring economic gains with them, a useful counterweight to the Jap
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It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of VoxTalks Economics as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the VoxTalks Economics podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official VoxTalks Economics product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by VoxTalks.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does VoxTalks Economics release new episodes?
VoxTalks Economics publishes 2x weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does VoxTalks Economics cover?
VoxTalks Economics covers topics including Science, News, Education, Business, Social Sciences. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting VoxTalks Economics summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.