VoxTalks Economics

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.

There is a saying in Spanish: get burned by hot milk, and the sight of a cow makes you cry. New research implies that, decades after a populist government leaves office, the central bank it once tried to control is still flinching.
Martín Uribe (Columbia) and Nicolás Magud (IMF) have investigated the long-run effect of populist governments that leaned on their central banks to print money and feed inflation. They find that these central banks raise interest rates more aggressively than others when inflation drifts above target, even decades later.
This is the second of four episodes drawn from papers commissioned for the second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference, organised by CEPR, CESifo and Sciences Po.
The research behind this episode:
Jácome, Luis, Nicolás E. Magud, Samuel Pienknagura, and Martín Uribe. 2026. "Fiscal Populism and Monetary Policy Rules." Conference draft, presented at the 2nd Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues Conference, Venice, 19-20 June 2026. Forthcoming in Economic Policy.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, Martín Uribe, and Nicolás E. Magud. 2026. "Fiscal Populism and Monetary Policy." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guests

Martin Uribe is the Robert A. Mundell Professor of Economics at Columbia University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research spans international macroeconomics and the theory of monetary and fiscal policy, with recent work on tariff shocks, fiscal dominance, and the long-run legacy of high inflation on how central banks set policy. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Economics.
Nicolás E. Magud is a Senior Economist in the International Monetary Fund's Western Hemisphere Department. His research spans open-economy macroeconomics, with a focus on fiscal policy, exchange rates, capital flows, and capital controls, much of it drawn from Latin America's long experience of inflation and central bank reform.
Research cited in this episode

The populist leaders database. Funke, Manuel, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch. 2023. "Populist Leaders and the Economy." American Economic Review 113 (12): 3249-88. The authors classify a leader as populist if their rhetoric splits society into "the people" against "the elites," then divide populists into left-wing, whose target is economic elites, and right-wing, whose target is foreigners and minorities. 
Deficit monetisation and "unpleasant monetarist arithmetic." Sargent, Thomas J., and Neil Wallace. 1981. "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic." Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 5 (3). The paper that established the mechanism this episode turns on: when a government's deficit is financed by its own central bank printing money rather than by selling bonds to the public, the result is inflation. It gives the paper's account of populism and central bank credit its theoretical backbone.
Local projections difference-in-differences. Dube, Arindrajit, Daniele Girardi, Oscar Jorda , and Alan M. Taylor. 2025. "A Local Projections Approach to Difference-in-Differences." Journal of Applied Econometrics 40 (7): 741-58. The statistical method behind the paper's headline charts. It compares countries that have just installed a populist government against "clean" control countries with no recent populist history, tracking central bank credit year by year after the change of regime.
The Central Bank Independence Extended (CBIE) index. Romelli, Davide. 2022. "The Political Economy of Reforms in Central Bank Design: Evidence from a New Dataset." Economic Policy 37 (112): 641-88. A dataset scoring central bank laws on their independence, including limits on lending to government. The paper uses it to show that countries with a populist past, especially a left-wing one, now have stricter legal limits on central bank lending than countries with no such history.
Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. The paper's three historical case studies. In Argentina, governments from Perón onward repeatedly rewrote central bank law to permit financing of the treasury, contributing to repeated bouts of high inflation and, eventually, hyperinflation in the 1980s. In Chile, the Allende government printed money to fund an expansion of the state, and inflation reached roughly 600% in 1973 before the government was overthrown. In Mexico, President Echeverría's public investment drive in the 1970s was financed in part by the central bank, feeding an inflation and currency crisis that culminated in the country's 1982 default. Uribe and Magud point to these episodes as the historical template their statistical results describe.
Related reading on VoxEU

Central bank independence: An update, a VoxEU column in which Sylvester Eijffinger and Jakob de Haan argue that legal independence alone does not shield a central bank from political pressure to loosen policy.
Recent trends in central bank independence, in which Davide Romelli, whose index this paper uses to track legal independence, documents a fresh wave of reforms strengthening central banks worldwide since 2016.

Textbook economics says a tariff should strengthen a country's currency. Since the start of 2025, as US tariffs rose ... and the dollar fell.
In the first of four episodes of Voxtalks based on papers presented at the second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference, Alfonso Merendino (Bocconi University) and Tommaso Monacelli (Bocconi University, CEPR) tell Tim Phillips what they found when they looked for reasons. Their conclusion: for tariffs, it's not size, it is how permanent people expect it to be. They call this structural trade policy uncertainty. 
When that uncertainty is low, a tariff behaves exactly as the textbook says. When it's high, the same tariff can weaken the currency, shrink output and pull down inflation instead.
The research behind this episode:
Merendino, Alfonso, and Tommaso Monacelli. 2026. "Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Exchange Rate." Conference draft, presented at the 2nd Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues Conference, Venice, 19-20 June 2026. Forthcoming in Economic Policy.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, Tommaso Monacelli, and Alfonso Merendino. 2026. "Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Exchange Rate." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guests

Tommaso Monacelli is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University and a Research Fellow of IGIER Bocconi and CEPR. His research spans international macroeconomics, monetary policy and the business cycle, with recent work on tariffs and monetary policy, supply chain uncertainty and inflation, and heterogeneous bank models of monetary transmission. He is co-editor of the Journal of International Economics and was managing co-editor of Economic Policy from 2016 to 2021.
Alfonso Merendino is a PhD student in Economics at Yale University and a Research Fellow at the Social Economics Lab. He recently completed a research placement in macroeconomic modelling at the European Central Bank, and holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Economics from Bocconi University, where this paper was written.
Research cited in this episode

Structural trade-policy uncertainty (S-TPU). The paper's central measure, capturing uncertainty not about the size of a tariff but about how persistent the trade-policy regime behind it will be. Merendino and Monacelli split observed US tariff rates from 1990 to 2025 into a persistent component and a short-lived transitory one, using a state-space model with separate volatility for each, and define S-TPU as the volatility of the persistent component.
The 2017 US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The authors' example of a pure S-TPU shock. The withdrawal changed no tariff rate on impact, but it reshuffled expectations about the durability of US trade policy, and their index of structural uncertainty spikes at this point.
"Liberation Day" tariffs, April 2025. The sweeping tariff package announced by the Trump administration on 2 April 2025. The paper treats this, alongside the 2018 Section 301 tariffs on China, as one of two clearly identified tariff shocks used to anchor its statistical model.
Aggregate trade-policy uncertainty index. Caldara, Dario, Matteo Iacoviello, Patrick Molligo, Andrea Prestipino, and Andrea Raffo. 2020. "The Economic Effects of Trade Policy Uncertainty." Journal of Monetary Economics 109: 38-59. This newspaper-based index of trade-policy uncertainty mixes announcement noise with genuine regime change; Merendino and Monacelli show that conditioning on it, rather than on their narrower S-TPU measure, erases the state-dependent pattern they document.
Narrative-dominance identification. The technique the authors use to isolate tariff shocks in their statistical model, adapted from Juan Antolín-Díaz and Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez. 2018. "Narrative Sign Restrictions for SVARs." American Economic Review 108 (10). Rather than imposing a full statistical model, the method anchors identification to a small number of clearly documented policy events, such as the 2018 and 2025 tariff rounds, and lets everything else, including the sign of the exchange-rate response, be estimated freely from the data.
More VoxTalks Economics episodes

The second Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues conference follows the first, held in Paris in December 2025. Three earlier VoxTalks Economics episodes from that Paris conference asked what comes next for Ukraine's economy.
What's next for Ukraine: Investment, in which Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Maurice Obstfeld argue that forgiving Ukraine's war debt, rather than treating it as an obstacle, is essential to attracting the $40 billion a year that reconstruction needs.
What's next for Ukraine: Reconstruction, in which Edward Glaeser, Martina Kirchberger, and Andrii Parkhomenko argue that postwar Tokyo, not Warsaw or Berlin, is the right model for rebuilding Ukraine's cities.
What's next for Ukraine: The labour market, in which Giacomo Anastasia documents the surprising resilience of Ukraine's wartime labour market.
Related reading on VoxEU

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 is explained by foreign retaliation, a different mechanism from the persistence channel that Merendino and Monacelli identify.
Tariffs, the dollar, and equities: High-frequency evidence from the Liberation Day announcement, in which Jonathan Hartley and Alessandro Rebucci show that the dollar depreciated on impact on 2 April 2025, against the standard prediction, and trace this to foreign investors rebalancing away from US equities.