VoxTalks Economics

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 a war. Historians now argue the embargo did the opposite, and hastened Japan's entry into the war.
Isabelle Méjean (Sciences Po, CEPR) calls this "The safety paradox". Trade between rivals makes war more expensive. Cut that trade to protect your interests, and you make conflict cheaper, for your rival as well as for you. In a new VoxTalk she talks to Tim Phillips about economic coercion, decoupling, and why Europe should treat its trade agreements as insurance.
Méjean and her co-authors simulated the US decoupling from China. Raising tariffs by 20 percentage points, roughly what the first Trump administration did, raises the probability of war by 2%, she estimates. That sounds small until you consider what a war between the US and China would mean.
The research behind this episode:
Mayer, Thierry, Isabelle Méjean, and Mathias Thoenig. 2025. "The Fragmentation Paradox: De-risking Trade and Global Safety." CEPR Discussion Paper 20564 (gated).
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Isabelle Méjean. 2026. "The Safety Paradox." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Isabelle Méjean is Professor of Economics at Sciences Po and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, where she directs the International Trade and Regional Economics programme and is a member of the Research Policy Network on Geoeconomics and Security. She is a scientific advisor at CEPII and a member of the French Conseil d'Analyse Économique, with research spanning international trade, firm-to-firm networks, and how shocks to individual firms move whole economies. In 2020 she was named Best Young Economist of France.
Research cited in this episode

Make Trade Not War? Philippe Martin, Thierry Mayer, and Mathias Thoenig's 2008 paper in the Review of Economic Studies (75(3): 865-900) provided the first quantitative evidence that bilateral trade integration reduces the probability of interstate conflict; the diplomatic game in the new paper builds directly on it.
Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois (1748). The earliest statement of the idea, Méjean notes, that interdependence between nations raises the cost of conflict and strengthens the hand of diplomacy; what was trade dependence in the 18th century now includes finance and technology.
The US oil embargo on Japan, 1941. Méjean's historical example of the safety paradox in action; a policy designed to impose costs on Japan is widely credited by historians with accelerating its entry into the Second World War.
China's trade ban on Lithuania. After Lithuania allowed a Taiwanese representative office to open in Vilnius in 2021, China blocked Lithuanian products from its market; the episode's example of open economic coercion, and one that prompted the EU's Anti-Coercion Instrument, in force since 2023.
Liberation Day tariffs. The US tariffs announced in April 2025; Méjean points to the tariff on Brazil, justified by the treatment of former president Jair Bolsonaro, as a tariff with an explicitly geopolitical rather than economic purpose.
Rare earths. China holds a near monopoly across mining, refining, and magnet production; Méjean's example of where future trade agreements could act as insurance, because deposits outside China offer more scope for diversification than mining in Europe.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Europe in the Middle. Pol Antras and Beata Javorcik, recorded at the same forum, on what the US-China realignment means for European producers and consumers.
World War Trade. Richard Baldwin on how world trade was weaponised, and where the trading order goes from here.
Trading Around Geopolitics. Giancarlo Corsetti, Banu Demir, and Beata Javorcik on why trade sanctions can be like squeezing a balloon.
Related reading on VoxEU

Why 'de-risking' may not deliver a large peace dividend, a VoxEU column estimating that a doubling of bilateral trade reduces the probability of militarised conflict by roughly 30%.
How geopolitics is changing trade, a VoxEU column documenting the fragmentation of trade flows along geopolitical lines.
Geopolitical risk and supply chain diversification, a VoxEU column on how firms respond to geopolitical risk in their sourcing decisions.

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 to test the one barrier everyone assumes matters most: the price of a newspaper. She and her co-authors gave free digital subscriptions to Le Monde and media education to thousands of French high school students for a year, and then tracked what the students actually read. It's a bit like persuading kids to eat vegetables when there are fries on the table, she tells Tim Phillips. Can a free subscription persuade France's teens to use their phones differently and eat their media greens, and what changes when they do?
The research behind this episode:
Briole, Simon, Julia Cagé, and Andrea Prat. 2026. "Making Teenagers Read Newspapers: A Nationwide Experiment in French High Schools." CEPR Discussion Paper 21706. Gated.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Julia Cagé. 2026. “Making teenagers read newspapers”. VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Julia Cagé is Professor of Economics at Sciences Po Paris and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), where she leads the CEPR Research and Policy Network on Media Plurality. Her research spans media economics, political participation, and the economics of information, with a particular focus on how news markets shape political knowledge and democratic engagement. She is the author of several books on the media, including Saving the Media and The Price of Democracy.
Research cited in this episode

Reuters Institute Digital News Report is an annual global survey that tracks how people find, consume, and pay for news across dozens of countries. Cagé cites its long-running data on declining time spent reading news online, a trend she says is sharpest among the young.
Post-Broadcast Democracy, a book by the political scientist Markus Prior, argues that the shift from a small number of broadcast TV channels to an environment of unlimited media choice let people who were never especially interested in news opt out of it entirely. Cagé uses Prior's framework to argue that the internet did not create this problem; television did, and the internet simply deepened it.
Information inequality describes the finding that lower-income, less-educated citizens draw on fewer sources of political information than wealthier, better-educated ones, widening gaps in political knowledge. The concept draws on earlier work by Cagé's co-author Andrea Prat, and it motivates the experiment's focus on whether free access to quality journalism narrows that gap for teenagers from poorer backgrounds.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Misinformation and trust in news, in which Ruben Durante discusses a field experiment testing how AI-generated misinformation changes readers' trust in, and demand for, credible journalism.
Related reading on VoxEU

Information inequality, a VoxEU column by Paul Kennedy and Andrea Prat setting out the cross-country evidence that poorer, less-educated voters consume fewer sources of political news, the pattern this episode's experiment sets out to address.

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 corporate lifetimes away, and the planet needs emission reductions today. What actually changes in the boardroom when a pledge is signed?
Simon Dietz (LSE, CEPR) has tracked climate management practices and emissions at nearly 2,000 companies to find out. He tells Tim Phillips that the picture is not the one that either side of the debate might expect. A net zero pledge doesn't usually signify an immediate cut in emissions, but there is a clear and early shift in how companies plan for net zero that has often started before the announcement. What is left is something is harder to spot: firms making a strategic pivot, of which the public commitment is only one part.
The research behind this episode:
Dietz, Simon, and Nikolaus Hastreiter. 2026. "Corporate Net Zero Targets: Have They Achieved Anything?" CEPR Discussion Paper 21441 (gated).
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Simon Dietz. 2026. "Are net zero commitments greenwash?" VoxTalks Economics (podcast).
About the guest
Simon Dietz is Professor of Environmental Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Research Director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and Research Director of the LSE Transition Pathway Initiative Global Climate Transition Centre. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research spans climate change economics, corporate sustainability, decision-making under uncertainty, and climate finance.
Research cited in this episode
The Paris Agreement and the 1.5°C target. The 2015 UN Paris Agreement on Climate Change set a goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C, with a stretch target of 1.5°C. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change subsequently concluded that meeting the 1.5°C goal requires global emissions to reach net zero by around mid-century, giving corporate net zero pledges their scientific rationale.
Science Based Targets initiative, UN Race to Zero, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. These are among the organisations that encouraged corporations to adopt long-term net zero commitments following the Paris Agreement, helping drive the rapid diffusion of pledges that Dietz and Hastreiter document.
Trucost and the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI). Dietz and Hastreiter combine two emissions datasets to overcome measurement problems in this area. Trucost provides broad coverage of around 1,600 large listed firms, combining self-reported data with modelled estimates. TPI provides sector-specific, physically normalised emissions intensity data for a smaller sample of roughly 200 companies in the highest-emitting sectors; Dietz is Research Director of the TPI Global Climate Transition Centre, which is based at LSE.
Difference-in-differences with matching. To separate the effect of a net zero pledge from the fact that greener firms are more likely to make one in the first place, the authors compare firms before and after adoption against similar firms that have not yet adopted, using propensity score matching to build a comparable control group.
The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures framework. The paper groups management practices into four pillars from this framework: governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. It finds no significant effect of net zero pledges on governance, risk management, or metrics and targets, but a significant and positive effect on strategy, including climate scenario planning and internal carbon pricing.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes
A big push for climate policy, in which Rick van der Ploeg argues that gradual policy change risks backsliding, and sets out what a genuinely transformative climate push would require.
Related reading on VoxEU.org
Corporate net zero targets: Neither greenwashing nor a gamechanger, in which Dietz and Hastreiter set out the findings behind this episode in their own words.
Corporate climate commitments: A profit-driven strategy, not just empty promises, in which Viral Acharya, Robert Engle, and Olivier Wang model when large firms and their investors have a financial incentive to follow through on climate pledges.
Business as usual: Bank net zero commitments, lending, and engagement, in which Parinitha Sastry, Emil Verner, and David Marques-Ibanez find that banks' net zero pledges predict decarbonisation of their loan portfolios, but not reduced lending to high-carbon sectors.

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 Blanchard's diagnosis. Blanchard (MIT, Paris School of Economics, Peterson Institute) is one of four economists leading Europe 2050, a new CEPR initiative asking where Europe wants to be in 25 years, and how it gets there. Blanchard's overriding principle: a vision without plumbing goes nowhere, and plumbing without vision is just reacting to the next tweet.
Who can combine the vision and the plumbing, and produce ideas that we haven't seen before? Europe might be short of solutions to its current malaise, but it is not short of people with ideas: the project sent out 50 invitations for policy papers. Blanchard expected 30 replies. He got 48.
The research behind this episode:
Blanchard, Olivier, Pascal Lamy, Enrico Letta, and Beatrice Weder di Mauro. 2026. "Europe 2050: Geometries of Peace, Power, and Prosperity." VoxEU column, CEPR, 16 March 2026.
The CEPR Europe 2050 initiative launched by Blanchard, Lamy, Letta and Weder di Mauro is generating a rolling series of commissioned policy papers and shorter open call submissions. The full set of contributions can be found at cepr.org/europe-2050-geometries-peace-power-and-prosperity.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Olivier Blanchard. 2026. "Europe in 2050." VoxTalks Economics (podcast). 
About the guest
Olivier Blanchard is the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at MIT, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics, and Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He is a CEPR Distinguished Fellow. Blanchard's research spans macroeconomics, monetary and fiscal policy, and the economics of European integration; he was chief economist and director of research at the IMF from 2008 to 2015. 
Research cited in this episode
Europe 2050: Geometries of Peace, Power, and Prosperity is the CEPR initiative behind this episode, launched by Blanchard, Lamy, Letta and Weder di Mauro. It commissions longer policy papers and runs an open call for shorter pieces, five to fifteen pages, on what Europe should aspire to become by 2050. Blanchard describes it as a box of tools rather than a single blueprint, deliberately open to contributors who disagree on fundamentals, including whether Europe should become a federation.
The Draghi report refers to Mario Draghi's 2024 report for the European Commission, The Future of European Competitiveness. It diagnosed Europe's weak productivity growth, fragmented capital markets and insufficient scale financing for innovative firms. Blanchard contrasts it with Europe 2050, which he says is not trying to produce a similarly prescriptive plan.
The Letta report refers to Enrico Letta's 2024 report Much More Than a Market, commissioned by the European Council, which set out proposals for deepening the EU single market. Letta is one of the four leaders of Europe 2050.
"Getting to Denmark" is a concept popularised by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 2011 book The Origins of Political Order, describing the temptation to picture a distant, well governed destination without a plan for the institutional steps needed to reach it. Is this a risk for Europe 2050?
Schengen is raised by Blanchard as a working example of a "coalition of the willing": a group of countries, not all of them EU members, that agreed to abolish border controls between themselves without waiting for unanimous agreement across the whole Union. He points to it as a template for how Europe might make progress on other issues where full consensus is unlikely.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes
This episode was recorded at the Paris School of Economics-CEPR Policy Forum 2026, alongside a series of conversations with forum speakers.
Europe in the Middle, the previous episode, features Pol Antràs and Beata Javorcik on how the US-China trade war is reshaping trade flows into Europe, and who wins and loses from it.
Related reading on VoxEU
Europe's challenge and opportunity: Building coalitions of the willing, a VoxEU column by Blanchard and Jean Pisani-Ferry, sets out the coalition of the willing idea in more detail, working through how it might apply to climate, trade and tax policy.
Capitalising on Europe's strengths, a VoxEU column by Debora Revoltella and colleagues at the European Investment Bank, looks at what Europe already does well and how policy can build on it rather than only cataloguing weaknesses.
Addressing European competitiveness: Investment, integration, and simplification, another VoxEU column from the European Investment Bank, sets out the scale of Europe's investment gap and where past bursts of EU investment have come from.
EU capital markets reform should focus on innovation investment, a VoxEU column, argues that capital markets union, a project Blanchard mentions in the episode, should be judged by whether it gets money to innovative firms, not just by market integration for its own sake.

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 Pol Antràs (Harvard) and Beata Javorcik (EBRD, Oxford) what this means for European producers and consumers.
Antràs and Andrea Presbitero have mapped which countries and sectors face the sharpest competition from redirected Chinese exports, and which stand to gain. Does cheap Chinese tech ease Europe's energy cost crisis, or squeeze European manufacturers of wind turbines and electric cars?
If Europe decides to take the gains where consumers and firms can get them, and compensate the producers who are legitimately hurt, how do they go about it? And can raising tariffs in a world of global value chains protecting one sector without damaging others?
New episode, recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum 2026 in Paris.
The research behind this episode:
Antràs, Pol, and Andrea F. Presbitero. 2026. "The Remains of the Trade: The U.S.-China Trade War and its Aftermath." Preliminary version
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, Pol Antràs, and Beata Javorcik. 2026. "Europe in the Middle." VoxTalks Economics (podcast). 
About the guests:
Pol Antras is Robert G. Ory Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research spans global value chains, the organisation of multinational firms, and, most recently, the intersection of trade policy and geopolitics.
Beata Javorcik is Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, on leave from her position as Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College. She is Director of the International Trade Programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her research spans foreign direct investment, industrial policy, and, increasingly, the economics of geopolitical fragmentation.
Research cited in this episode:
The Great Reallocation is the term coined by Laura Alfaro and Davin Chor for the reorganisation of United States sourcing away from direct imports from China and toward alternative suppliers such as Vietnam, Mexico, and Taiwan. Antràs and Presbitero's paper extends this idea to third countries, showing that Chinese exports displaced from the American market are increasingly landing in Europe and Asia rather than disappearing.
Geopolitical externality is a concept developed by Laura Alfaro, Maggie Chen, and Beata Javorcik in their working paper "The Battle over Knowledge: Multinationals, Diffusion, and Governance." It describes how knowledge transferred abroad by multinational firms can strengthen a rival state's strategic capability in ways the firm never intended and the market never prices, which is why governments increasingly restrict flows of codified, tacit, and organisational knowledge that would once have passed unremarked.
Voluntary export restraints were the mechanism used to defuse the United States' trade conflict with Japanese carmakers in the 1980s. Rather than imposing tariffs, Japan agreed to limit its car exports, and Japanese manufacturers responded by building plants directly in the United States. Javorcik cites this as the precedent for how the current standoff over Chinese electric vehicles and knowledge transfer might eventually be resolved.
The Draghi report on European competitiveness, published by the European Commission in September 2024, recommended conditioning Chinese investment in the European electric vehicle sector on mandatory knowledge transfer. Javorcik notes the difficulty of calibrating such requirements: demand too little and Europe gains nothing from the technology; demand too much and Chinese investors have no reason to come at all.
"Industrial Policies for Multi-stage Production: The Battle for Battery-powered Vehicles," by Keith Head, Thierry Mayer, Marc Melitz, and Chenying Yang, models how tariffs and subsidies reshape the location of battery and vehicle assembly plants across a multi-stage supply chain. Antràs cites the paper's finding that protecting the electric vehicle sector through tariffs can produce worse outcomes than the problem it was meant to solve.
Export controls and innovation, discussed by Javorcik with reference to Chinese firms such as DeepSeek and Huawei, illustrate a pattern in which restricting a country's access to a technology, in this case advanced semiconductors, can accelerate that country's innovation in adjacent areas rather than simply constraining it. She draws a parallel with rare earth export restrictions, which have historically spurred substitute technologies rather than suppressing them.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes:
In a conversation recorded at the CEPR Annual Forum in Paris called "What should Europe do about Trump?" Tim Phillips spoke to Beatrice Weder di Mauro and Ugo Panizza of the Graduate Institute Geneva, about how Europe should respond to the second Trump administration's trade policies.
Listeners interested in how firms navigate geopolitical trade disruption should also hear "Trading around geopolitics," in which Giancarlo Corsetti, Banu Demir, and Beata Javorcik discuss how Turkish exporters filled the gap left by sanctions on Russia.
Related reading on VoxEU:
"An update on the great reallocation in US supply chain trade" uses detailed United States import data through 2025 to track the scope and pace of the reallocation discussed in this episode.
"From tariffs to trade flows: Diversion effects and China's exports to the EU" examines the evidence for and against the trade deflection story that Antras and Javorcik discuss, and finds the picture more mixed than a simple diversion narrative suggests.
"China shock 2.0 and the euro area: Cheaper imports, tougher competition" decomposes the recent surge in Chinese exports to the euro area and argues that structural forces within China, rather than diversion from the American market, explain most of it.
"The impact of trade wars on firms in third countries" proposes a model of how bilateral trade shocks spill over to bystander economies, applying it to Italian firms during the 2018 to 2019 trade war.