VoxTalks Economics

For three decades years, software makers have paid bug bounty hunters to break their code so they can make it more secure. Recently, some software companies have decided that bug bounties programmes aren't useful any more: Curl shut its bounty in January, and Intel suspended its own in September. And the discovery of the PHP flaw that sent websites offline in October came fr...

Go to work, follow orders all day, and your living standards will rise. That is the deal behind the capitalist economy. In his forthcoming book, Cooperatives in the twenty-first century, Francesco Caselli (LSE, CEPR) argues that the deal has been broken for two generations. Pay at the top keeps climbing. Pay in the middle and at the bottom has barely moved.

The usual f...

The 29th Geneva Report on the World Economy examines three pressures on the international financial system at once: global imbalances, the status of the dollar, and the stability of bond markets. Two of its authors, Valentina Bruno (American University, CEPR) and Cédric Tille (Geneva Graduate Institute, CEPR), tell Tim Phillips why stocks, the dollar and US Treasuries all fe...

Who gets the kids? Courts aim to decide custody in the child's best interests, but nobody has had the data to test how well those decisions work.

Gordon Dahl (UC San Diego, CEPR), Costas Meghir (Yale, CEPR) and seven co-authors built the data themselves. They collected more than 56,000 Swedish custody rulings, scanning paper files by hand where no digital copy existed,...