Alex Edmans of the London Business School and CEPR, author of Grow the Pie, argues there doesn't have to be a trade-off between growing value for investors and for society. But what does this mean in practice, and how strong is the evidence?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just published its sixth report, warning of “unprecedented” effects and “irreversible” damage. For more than a year, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has been running its Virtual Seminar on Climate Economics to help economists estimate, model, and propose policies to mitigate the extent of the crisis. Glenn Rudebusch of the FRBSF tells Tim Phillips that “the economics profession as a whole has been slow to grapple with climate change”, and so the seminars are bringing fresh, interdisciplinary research to a wider audience.

As Covid-19 closed concert halls, galleries, and theatres it cut off the incomes of the people who worked in them. One year on, what has been the effect of the pandemic on artistic income? Alexander Cuntz of the World Intellectual Property Organisation has used unique incomes data from Germany to estimate how incomes have been affected, and how important states support has been for artists.

CEPR is creating a new programme area in political economy. Helios Herrera of the University of Warwick and Ronny Razin of LSE tell Tim Phillips how they plan to attract a wide range of economists and social scientists to the discipline, and how we can do a better job of translating polecon research into policy.