VoxTalks Economics

In March 2025, Apple chartered cargo flights to deliver 600 tonnes of iPhones from India to the United States. A year earlier, four in five smartphones that imported to the US came from China. 
One of the aims of US trade policy has been to decouple the US economy from China. So is the strategy working? Chad Bown (PIIE, CEPR) tells Tim Phillips how he examined the US import data product by product to see how American importers coped with Trump's second trade war. In consumer electronics, many firms quietly built a second supply chain in tariff-exempt countries before 2025, and switched sourcing away from China almost overnight in 2025. But clothing and footwear did not switch, because alternative source countries like Vietnam faced tariffs almost as high. When the US taxes imports from every country, the decoupling strategy gets lost.
The research behind this episode:
Bown, Chad P. 2026. "How Did Trump's 2025 Trade War Affect the Decoupling of US-China Supply Chains?" CEPR Discussion Paper DP21801 (gated). Forthcoming in Asian Economic Policy Review. 
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Chad P. Bown. 2026. "Decoupling from China after Trump's Trade Wars." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Chad P. Bown is the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a Fellow in the International Trade and Regional Economics programme of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He was chief economist at the US Department of State from January 2024 to January 2025, and senior economist for international trade and investment on President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. His research spans trade policy, industrial policy, economic security and supply chains. He co-created the Trade Talks podcast with Soumaya Keynes in 2017, and with Keynes he is co-author of How to Win a Trade War (Simon & Schuster, 2026).
Research cited in this episode

The 2018-19 Section 301 tariffs. In Trump's first term the US imposed tariffs on imports from China in stages, on product lists set under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. Lists 1, 2 and 3, mostly intermediate inputs such as auto parts, ended at 25%. List 4A began at 15% and was cut to 7.5% in February 2020 under the Phase One agreement. List 4B, mostly consumer goods such as smartphones, laptops and toys, was delayed "for Christmas season" and never imposed. By the end of the first trade war, roughly two thirds of US imports from China faced new tariffs. Bown's point is that the goods spared in 2018-19 were the ones hit hardest in 2025.
The 2025 IEEPA tariffs on China. In February and March 2025, before Liberation Day, the US imposed two rounds of 10% tariffs on all imports from China under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, justified by concerns over fentanyl. For the first time this covered smartphones and other List 4B goods. One of the two was removed in November 2025 after Presidents Trump and Xi met in South Korea.
Liberation Day. On 2 April 2025 the US announced tariffs on most of its trading partners, at rates that varied by country. A long list of products, including smartphones, was exempt under Annex II. On 9 April the country rates were paused and a 10% baseline applied while countries negotiated. China's rates escalated after retaliation on both sides; the Liberation Day actions on China alone reached 125% before a truce in Geneva in May. The exemptions matter to the episode. A tariff on China changes sourcing only if the alternatives face a lower one.
The August 2025 tariffs on India. The US raised tariffs on India by a further 25 percentage points in August 2025, citing India's purchases of Russian oil. Smartphones were again exempt, so Apple's Indian supply chain stayed tariff free. For some clothing, India ended up facing a larger tariff increase than China.
The Supreme Court ruling on IEEPA tariffs. On 20 February 2026 the US Supreme Court ruled that the country-level tariffs imposed under IEEPA were illegal. The Section 232 sectoral tariffs and the Section 301 tariffs on China were not part of the case. The administration removed the IEEPA tariffs and began imposing new ones under other legal authorities, which is why Bown warns that some of the 2025 effects may yet reverse.
Apple's alternative supply chain in India. Apple and its contract manufacturers, including Foxconn and Tata Electronics, spent several years building iPhone assembly in India. Patrick McGee tells the story in Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company (Simon & Schuster, 2026). Over the last nine months of 2025, 40% of US smartphone imports came from China and 46% from India. Laptops, monitors and video game consoles moved in a similar way, mostly to Vietnam.
Inputs for AI. The paper defines AI inputs using the product codes that Nvidia publishes for export control compliance: certain semiconductors, printed circuit boards, servers and other data centre hardware. These made up about 14% of US imports in 2025. They grew by $183 billion that year, more than the $144 billion rise in total US goods imports. A separate classification by Michael Waugh (2026) finds a larger share, at 23%.
US tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. In 2024 the Biden administration raised US tariffs on electric vehicles from China to 100%, using the authority of the 2018 Section 301 action. China exported 40% of the world's electric vehicles in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, but almost none to the United States.
China's export restrictions on rare earths. In April 2025 China restricted exports of rare earths and permanent magnets, of which it produces about 90% of world supply. Bown did not include these products in the paper, but they are the reverse of the decoupling story. They are goods for which the US found no alternative supplier.
Tariff pass-through to consumer prices. Bown suggests that firms with an alternative supplier may explain why some prices, such as the iPhone's, did not rise. He points to work by Alberto Cavallo, Paola Llamas and Franco Vazquez (2025), "Tracking the Short-Run Price Impact of U.S. Tariffs," NBER Working Paper 34496, which tracks how the 2025 tariffs reached retail prices.
How to Win a Trade War. Soumaya Keynes and Chad P. Bown. 2026. How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy. New York: Simon & Schuster. The authors argue that the conflict with China will not reverse, and that other economies are now dealing with China-related shocks of their own.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Making sense of the US-China trade war, in which Bown explained the first trade war in 2021, as it ended. It is the "before" to this episode's "after".
Tariff Confusion, in which Kalina Manova explains how the frequency of tariff announcements in 2025 cut trade by more than the tariffs themselves.
Related reading on VoxEU.org

US-China decoupling: Rhetoric and reality, a VoxEU column showing that after the first trade war US imports from China slowed, but supply chains for strategic products stayed intertwined with China.
What comes next for global supply chains might be complicated, a VoxEU column on why a falling Chinese share of US imports does not mean Chinese firms have left the supply chain.
Tariff confusion, a VoxEU column by Kalina Manova, Dennis Novy, Thomas Sampson and Aaron Tang on how confusion about current US tariffs reduced trade in 2025.

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 guest

Marius 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 episode

Protected 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 episodes

Wealth 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 half of the question Brulhart raises about who decides where wealth goes.
Related reading on VoxEU.org

Wealth taxation: The Swiss experience, by Marius Brulhart, Jonathan Gruber, Matthias Krapf, and Kurt Schmidheiny, on how Swiss wealth holders respond to the rate they pay.
How inheritances influence wealth inequality, by Mikael Elinder, Oscar Erixson, and Daniel Waldenstrom, using Swedish register data covering every heir of every decedent over several years.
The intergenerational transmission of wealth in rich countries, by Salvatore Morelli and co-authors, on how large transfers push up wealth inequality across seven countries.

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 guest

Jan 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 episode

The 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.
Related reading on VoxEU.org

What we can learn about economics from professional sport during COVID-19, a VoxEU column on why sport keeps producing clean natural experiments for economists.
Racial bias in newspaper ratings of professional football players, a VoxEU column using match ratings to test for discrimination in a labour market where output is measured in public every week.

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 guest

Alejandro 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 episode

The 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 episodes

Fiscal 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.org

Four 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 VoxEU column by Rabah Arezki showing that commodity windfalls tend to be saved where executive power is constrained, and spent where it is not, a pattern that echoes this paper's account of institutional decay under populist rule.

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 guest

Tarek 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 episode

Liberation 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." Journal of Development Economics 81 (1): 163 to 192. This widely used index scores how open a country's capital account is to cross-border investment. China scores close to the bottom, in the same range as India, Russia, Brazil and Pakistan, while the United States and the eurozone score close to the maximum, which is central to why Hassan treats the renminbi as a non-contender for anchor status while capital controls remain in place.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Exchange Rate, the first episode in this series, in which Alfonso Merendino and Tommaso Monacelli offer another explanation of why the dollar fell rather than rose after the 2025 tariffs.
How Exchange Rates Responded to Tariffs, in which Giancarlo Corsetti also tells Tim Phillips what happened to the dollar after Liberation Day, and why the textbook response did not show up.
Related reading on VoxEU.org

Tariffs and US Dollar Depreciations: Not So Surprising After All, a VoxEU column in which Giancarlo Corsetti, Simon Lloyd and Daniel Ostry argue that the dollar's fall after Liberation Day looks less puzzling once expected retaliation and long run risk are taken into account.
Tariffs, Global Imbalances, and the Dollar, in which Oleg Itskhoki and Dmitry Mukhin examine whether tariffs aimed at shrinking the US trade deficit can actually work, and what trying would mean for the dollar.