S9 Ep47: The Next Generation: PSE 2026

Travel broadens the mind. So the Voxtalks visits a conference, we find the most interesting research from economists just starting out, and hand three of them a microphone. Ad that is today's episode, recorded at the CEPR Paris School of Economics Policy Forum 2026.

Listen to hear three findings that undercut conventional wisdom. Guido Lamarmora (University of Nottingham) argues that the usual policy prescription for developing economies that want to industrialise of raising agricultural productivity can deepen their reliance on farming rather than break it. Costanza Tomaselli (Imperial College London) studies what an energy price shock in Mexico does to employment: she finds that firms without access to credit hire rather than fire. Mushegh Tovmasyan (University of Paris-Saclay) follows Armenia after Russia was sanctioned in 2022, where trade doubled but the gains went to incumbents and their workers, not to new firms.

The research behind this episode:

Lamarmora, Guido. 2026. "The Food Problem in an Open Economy." 

Tomaselli, Costanza, and Armando Rangel Colina. 2026. "Energy Shocks, Employment Response, and Heterogeneous Credit Access." 

Tovmasyan, Mushegh. 2026. "Trade and Firm-Level Adjustments to Geopolitical Shifts: Evidence from Armenia." 

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, Guido Lamarmora, Costanza Tomaselli, and Mushegh Tovmasyan. 2026. "The Next Generation: PSE 2026." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guests

Guido Lamarmora is completing his PhD at the University of Nottingham, with research on international trade, macro development, and structural transformation. Soon you will find him at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz as a postdoc.

Costanza Tomaselli is a PhD candidate at Imperial College Business School, with research spanning financial economics, industrial organisation, and energy economics.

Mushegh Tovmasyan is a PhD candidate at University Paris-Saclay, RITM, with research spanning international trade, sanctions, and firm and worker outcomes, built on newly accessible Armenian administrative microdata.

Research cited in this episode

The food problem. The long-standing account of why poor countries keep so many workers in agriculture; households spend most of their income on food, and low farm productivity means many workers are needed just to feed the population. Lamarmora's point is that the standard fix, raising farm productivity or opening to trade, need not hold once you model the economy as open and put land into the picture.

Land as a fixed factor. Agriculture uses land, which is fixed, as well as labour. Ignore it and a country with many workers per hectare looks unproductive when it is not. Once land is accounted for, low-income countries turn out to have relatively high agricultural productivity, which flips the conventional diagnosis.

Input-output linkages. Industry is wired into the rest of the economy through supply chains, so a rise in industrial productivity or cheaper industrial imports lowers costs everywhere, including on the farm. In Lamarmora's estimates the gains from industry run roughly twice those from raising agricultural productivity.

Storm Uri. The February 2021 winter storm that damaged the natural gas pipeline supplying Mexico's electricity, producing a sharp and spatially uneven jump in power prices. Tomaselli uses distance to gas-fired capacity as the source of variation to isolate the labour-market effect of an energy shock.

Credit access as a shock absorber. Mexico gave firms no fiscal support after the shock, which let Tomaselli see what finance alone can do. Firms with credit did not change production or employment; they borrowed to smooth the shock. The suggestive model implication is that easing credit frictions could do the work of a blanket energy subsidy at lower cost to the public purse.

Sanctions and the neutral economy. Sanctions destroy trade between the sanctioning and target countries but open opportunities for neutrals. Armenia, a landlocked transition economy with trade near 100% of GDP and Russia as its largest partner, saw trade double to triple after 2022. Tovmasyan uses Armenian customs and matched employer-employee microdata to ask whether this is new production, rerouting, or just higher prices.

Incumbent-led intermediation. The trade boom was driven by existing large firms scaling up relationships and adding sanctioned goods such as electronics and machinery, not by broad new entry. Employment barely moved; gains showed up as more hours and higher wages for existing workers, which Tovmasyan reads as intermediation rents shared with labour.

More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Previous next generations:

Paris 25: Ali Bakhtawar, Lucie Giorgi, and Alishuba Philip discuss Lawfare, single sex schooling, and slum clearance.

PSE 25: Pelin Ozgul, Deepakshi Singh, and Nathan Vieira on AI in call centres, female employment in India, and short-time work in Europe.

Paris 24: Laura Arnemann, Gustavo Julio García Bernal, and Matyas Molnar tall Tim about performance-related pay, intergenerational wealth, and international exhibitions. 

PSE 24: Alice Chiocchetti, Yuan Hu, and Christoph Semken describe their research on profit-shifting, green tech, and the effect of changing to a greener lifestyle.

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