Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity
The Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity connects you to cutting edge economic policy research and the renowned economists who create it. On each episode, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity editors introduce new BPEA research and present a conversation between the author and a Brookings scholar to bridge the divide between economic theory and practical policy solutions.
Episodes
At around $900 billion in transactions daily, the market for U.S. Treasuries is massive, not only in terms of quantity but also in terms of importance to the U.S. and global economies. The Treasury market is tied to interest rates, the value of the dollar, and financial markets around the world. So when shocks hit the Treasury market, as they did during the COVID-19 crisis, the ripple effects can be global. In a new paper, “Treasur...
The U.S. trade deficit has long been a source of political consternation, but it has come to the forefront in recent weeks. Just a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, he has made the trade deficit a key target of his aggressive tariff policies. On the day that President Trump announced a new, sweeping round of tariffs on all U.S. trade partners, Brookings Senior Fellow Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti was joined by Maurice Obstfe...
The Federal Reserve’s “Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy”—commonly referred to as its monetary policy framework—is composed of guiding principles the central bank uses in setting and communicating policy. Since the Fed last updated this framework in 2020, the global economy has faced unique challenges: COVID-19 shutdowns, widespread supply chain issues, and multiple global wars. In 2025, the Fed Board will ...
The clean energy transition has quietly pushed ahead in recent decades, with solar and wind energy accounting for almost 15% of total U.S. energy production in February 2024. The benefits of this transition on climate change have been celebrated, but less acknowledged have been the potential economic benefits. In a new paper, “The economic impacts of clean power,” Costas Arkolakis and Conor Walsh explain how cheaper electricity res...
Fiscal deficit projections are used by policymakers to understand the trajectory of U.S. debt. Between 1984 and 2003, Congress was responsive to these projections, raising taxes and cutting spending when projections showed that the deficit would grow. However, since 2004, fiscal policy has ceased being responsive to debt projections regardless of the party in power. In a new paper, “Robust Fiscal Stabilization,” Alan Auerbach and D...
When Congress considers legislation, nonpartisan agencies provide estimates of the law’s potential economic effects to policymakers, a process known as “scoring.” In recent decades, analysts at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation have developed models that incorporate complex feedback effects, going beyond conventional scoring techniques. These “dynamic scoring” methods can produce significantly differen...
Since 2022, Western nations have put a number of sanctions on Russia in response to its war in Ukraine. Policymakers and pundits have debated the efficacy of these measures, but this debate is belied by a deeper question: what does it mean for sanctions to “work”? In new BPEA research, Oleg Itskhoki of Harvard and Elina Ribakova of the Peterson Institute for International Economics explore fundamental questions of the theory and pr...
The full-employment rate of unemployment may seem like a contradiction, but in fact, economists have long understood that some unemployment is necessary. In their new paper, Pascal Michaillat of UC Santa Cruz and Saez of the University of California, Berkeley present a new formula for identifying the efficient rate of unemployment in the U.S. and find that the labor market has been inefficiently slack for most of the last century. ...
As COVID-19 swept across the globe, many nations struggled to define a cohesive public health strategy to prevent the spread of the disease. However, in spite of the lack of a clear plan, improvised strategies of behavioral changes—e.g., masking, social distancing—slowed transmission until a vaccine could be developed. The new BPEA paper, “The impact of vaccines and behaviors on U.S. cumulative deaths from COVID-19,” estimates that...
The failure of three mid-sized banks in March 2023—three of the four largest bank failures in history—shook financial markets and could’ve spread to other banks if regulators hadn’t stepped in. Two on-going trends in finance contributed to these failures: an increase in uninsured deposits and the migration of business lending to non-banks. In a new paper, “The evolution of banking in the 21st century,” a group of Harvard researcher...
Most advanced economies enjoyed a long period of low, stable inflation prior to 2021, with inflation
Many indicators suggest that the U.S. economy is thriving, yet Americans continue to have a negative overall economic outlook. Stubbornly high inflation has played a significant role in this negative sentiment among consumers, even as wage growth has caught up with the rate of inflation. In a new study, “Why do we dislike inflation?” Stefanie Stantcheva fielded a survey to explore how Americans experience inflation and why they hav...
In the mid-20th century, U.S. states experienced recessions very differently from one another, which resulted in many workers migrating between states in search of work. But a newly developed dataset shows that economic recoveries have begun to look very similar across states in recent decades. On this episode, Senior Fellow Louise Sheiner talks with Andrew Fieldhouse and David Munro, authors of a new BPEA study that produced this ...
Many countries have faced harrowing debt burdens, and reducing the national debt is usually a lasting challenge. But in just five years, the Jamaica reduced its debt-to-GDP ratio by 40 percentage points, something only a handful of other countries have done in that time frame. On this episode of the BPEA podcast, Peter Blair Henry of Stanford and UC Berkeley's Barry Eichengreen join Brookings Senior Fellow Gian Maria Milesi-Ferrett...
The COVID-19 pandemic shone a spotlight on supply chains, with shortages in everything from baby formula to microchips. This spurred an on-going policy debate on the need for the U.S. to shore up its supply chains, in some cases literally moving production back to the U.S. or allied nations. However, new analysis published in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity showed that effort may be more difficult than standard supply cha...
Economists have long debated the potential for rising wages and prices to push each other increasingly higher, driving inflation out of control—the so-called “wage-price spiral.” Concern about such a spiral has been high in the post-pandemic era, with inflation still running notably higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. On this episode of the Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity, Martin Neil Baily of Brookings talks with t...
Predictably, the rate of new business formations and business expansions at the beginning of the pandemic plummeted. But, in two waves, applications for new businesses and expansions quickly recovered, countering several decades of decline in business dynamism. Surprising many economists, applications have remained much stronger than before the pandemic. On this episode of the Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity, Hamilton Projec...
In an effort to quell post-pandemic inflation, the Federal Reserve raised short-term interest rates eleven times since March 2022, with the federal funds rate now at its highest in over 20 years. Historically, such interest rate hikes—or even the suggestion of hikes—has triggered financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies. But, so far, that hasn’t happened. In this episode of the Brookings Podcast on Economic Act...
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was a heated debate in Germany about whether to embargo the import of Russian natural gas as a sanction against Russia’s aggression. Before Germany could act, Russian began cutting the flow of gas to Germany, eventually halting it entirely. On this episode of the Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity, Benjamin Moll and Georg Zachmann talk with Economic Studies Director Ben Harris about ...
In their latest research in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Anne Case and Angus Deaton show that life expectancy for adults without a BA has been on the decline for almost a decade. On this episode of the Brookings P...
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