VoxTalks Economics

The latest Barcelona Report from the CEPR discusses how central banks and asset managers should manage climate and natural disaster risks. Xavier Vives tells Tim Phillips what the report has to say about mandates, hedging and resilience.

ESG – Environmental, Social and Governance – measures of bank performance are getting a lot of attention from shareholders and policymakers. But might more investment in ESG make banks less resilient? Thomas Gehrig tells Tim Phillips what the first research on this topic reveals.

As more of us wait to have children, more of us also worry if that's best for the health of our babies. Empirical evidence has been inconclusive so far but, based on new evidence, Hans Hvide tells Tim Phillips that this might be a problem with the way the research has been done.

If you had trouble in the last four years keeping up with what was happening in the trade war, you're not alone. Chad Bown tell Tim Phillips about his new paper that explains what happened, when, what it meant - and what happens next. 

An increasing amount of trade is digital, but trade negotiations are bogged down by arguments over how to regulate it. A new VoxEU ebook investigates what gets in the way of digital trade, and editors Ingo Borchert and Alan Winters tell Tim Phillips what we can do to make it work better.

Europe has struggled through two crises in the last decade, but this time its response has been much more decisive and ambitious. George Papaconstantinou tells Tim Phillips why Covid-19 may be the catalyst for deeper EU integration.You can download CEPR Policy Insight 109: Reshaping economic policy in the EU in the post-Covid world, by Marco Buti and George Papaconstantinou, here

Can we create a database of everyone in history? What would it tell us about who we consider to be important? Etienne Wasmer, Morgane Laouenan, and Arash Nekoei tell Tim Phillips about what their projects tell us.

We measure inequality using income as a proxy for welfare. But are we mixing up "doing well" with "being well"? Leandro Prados de la Escosura thinks so, and his research contradicts much of what we think we know about the long-run trends in inequality.

What would our economies be like if Bitcoin completely displaced fiat currency? Jon Danielsson tells Tim Phillips that it wouldn't be a world that he wants to live in. 

Good-looking economists get better academic posts. Galina Hale tells Tim Phillips about surprising new research that challenges our assumptions about how departments rate and recruit candidates.