VoxEU @ CEPR

Evidence from Spain's 2007 long-term care reform shows that access to cash subsidies and publicly funded home help raised life satisfaction, reduced loneliness, and increased survival, at a cost per quality-adjusted life year well below the thresholds applied to health programmes.

Agreements between manufacturers and retailers can affect competition across brands and stores through downstream retail pricing and changes in upstream wholesale contracting, with the wholesale channel generating the larger consumer welfare loss.

Belgian data show that the sales volumes of suppliers grow faster when there is a higher proportion of business w/ customers backed by private equity. This advantage is lost during downturns, as investors push for cost savings. Buyouts can also crowd out competitors that rely on the same suppliers.

China's retaliatory tariffs on imports from the US also induced evasion, especially through the misreporting of US-origin goods as originating from other third countries. 35% of the tariff-induced reduction in recorded imports is attributed to underreporting.

The shale revolution has transformed how the US economy responds to oil shocks. As the country shifted from a major petroleum importer to a net exporter, adverse oil supply news has become considerably less contractionary and can even support activity.

Following the post-pandemic inflation surge, nominal interest rates increased significantly in the US & euro area, though economic activity & labour markets remained resilient. This column finds evidence that implies a larger increase in the natural rate of interest than standard approaches suggest.

Centre-right parties should not shift further to the right to capture far-right voters. Evidence from the 2025 German federal election shows that the CDU shifting further to the right to capture AfD voters would not only have left the CDU worse off, but politics would be pulled further to the right.

J Böken, M Draca, N Mastrorocco, & A Ornaghi examine the relationship between Twitter likes and campaign contributions for US Members of Congress in 2019-2020. Returns are substantial only when politicians go viral, and a handful of stars capture a disproportionate amount of gains.

V Melo, D Neumark, L Sigaud, & G Wagner examine the impact of an increase in the minimum wage in California for workers at large & small fast-food chains. For smaller chains, employment, the number of establishments, and openings fell, while closures rose. The largest chains remained unchanged.

Comparing investors in emerging market local-currency sovereign bond markets by whether they are benchmarked to J.P. Morgan's main local-currency government bond index shows that benchmarked investors have increased their share of foreign holdings more than twofold over 2010–2025.

Patent data before and after acquisitions by 8 big tech giants show that, on average, the ‘Big Eight’ firms appear to invest in the acquired technology rather than kill it. Acquired inventions become more influential, more widely cited, and more embedded in follow-on innovation.

This column explores remote work’s impacts on UK employment & other outcomes such as commute times, hours worked, & wages. A 1 pp increase in working from home raises full-time employment of people w/ a physical disability by ~0.9% & raises full-time employment of workers aged 50-64 by ~0.4%.

This column reports two leading models writing an econometric script, as a chatbot that never runs it and as an agent that runs and revises it. Letting the models run their code raises the share of correct results from 79% to 97% and makes the prompt and the software matter far less.

Drawing on new cross-country evidence, Luiz de Mello & Joao Tovar Jalles show that fiscal consolidations launched in high-debt environments are markedly more contractionary, and in more than half of the episodes in the sample the debt ratio was still higher three years after consolidation.

Using data on financial policies in 88 democracies between 1973 and 2015, this column shows that leaders facing a binding term limit roll back financial liberalisation roughly three times more than leaders who can run again – but only in the wake of a financial crisis.

While tokenisation offers considerable promise, the transition to a tokenised world of finance will not be frictionless. The coexistence of on-chain systems with traditional off-chain infrastructures could create new challenges for market functioning.

Europe's dense network of small firms, regions, & languages puts it in a strong position to reap the benefits of small, open AI models that distribute economic power rather than concentrate it. Rules on switching, procurement, computing, & diffusion should be designed with this in mind.

Massimo Ferrari Minesso, Laura Lebastard, & Olga Triay Bagur present evidence that countries with interlinked fast payment systems trade with each other about 4% more than countries that lack such interlinkages. The trade gains are larger in regions with high cross-border payment costs.