Bloomberg audio studios podcasts radio news. Okay. So thank you all. The next paper is going presented by Omar Barbiero. US firms exposure to import tariffs a comparison of the 2018 and 2025 episodes. Can I ask a personal question? 25 minutes. when you present a paper like this at a research conference like this Boston Fed one do you get nervous and then I guess adjacent to that what's the best outcome for you when you present the paper and what's the sort of nightmare scenario would it be someone like finding some fundamental error in the methodology and like standing up in the middle of the conference and being like there's a serious problem here yeah I mean many many nightmare scenarios Sorry, I was just clicking randomly and then it went. Okay. All right. I would say the worst thing that can happen is that you just say something wrong that sounds dishonest almost like you're trying to hide something like there's clearly a data flaw and then you don't highlight it or you don't you say in public, "No, no, no, this is not a problem." And everybody knows that no, it's it's a problem. kind of that that's I think the profession is built on trust and if you if you lose that trust it's it's it's quite bad. That's Omar Barbierro, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He's getting ready to stand up in front of a room full of other economists, journalists, academics and his employer and present a research paper tracking the exposure of US businesses to import tariffs. This is a paper written jointly with Slavic Hillary and Alvaro who are there. There happen to be in the room our excellent research assistants Sophie and Lilia also who helped us with this with this paper. It's we wrote it for the conference is still quite preliminary and therefore we really value your your comments on this. But how many individual pieces of data would you say were involved in this particular study? Okay, product code they were they were around 400,000 I would say and then you have to multiply that by many different countries and so you have to keep track of that matrix. the supply chain data set was also quite fun because it's kind of a network of companies and it it gets big very very fast and you have to track it over time I have to say I mean we have excellent I mean I have I have excellent co-authors we have excellent research assistant we have excellent computing power thank god I can can help us with that and I don't know I I hundreds of thousands millions I ah Yes, millions. We are at the Boston Fed's annual flagship research conference. This is the 69th year of the event and the theme for 2025 is quote the US economy in a changing global landscape. So focusing on how things like tariffs, geopolitical tensions, industrial policy, AI, etc. are reshaping US growth, inflation, and the overall financial system. Clearly, that is a very rich vein to mine for research. And the format is a classic central bank research conference. Economists and other researchers are invited to write a paper for the event. They're assigned an official discussant and then they publicly present to a room full of their peers while the audience gets a chance to ask questions or sometimes critique. Yeah. You say it's a classic central bank research conference, but we've never actually been to one, I don't think. Right. It felt like a totally new environment. Yeah, it's true. We have gone to Jackson Hole for the past few years, which is probably the most famous Fed research conference, but it's famous because the Fed chair usually makes a speech and that gets all the attention. We've never actually been in the room at Jackson Hole where they discuss the research papers being presented because the Fed only allows a certain number of journalists into the room. The room. The room. The room. Also, I think it's unfair Kansas City Fed gets to hold their conference in the most beautiful place on earth instead of Kansas City in the middle of August. And then the Boston Fed, I mean, it's their choice, but the Boston Fed has theirs in Boston, which is lovely. We both had a great time. But November it it was very cold. Well, the upshot is that this time we were actually in the proverbial room. So for the first time we got to really experience and learn what an economic research conference actually is. Yeah, this is actually very key because if you sort of like wonder so okay Jerome Paul says something about you know the expected relationship between tariffs and inflationary but where did these ideas come from? Where are these assertions, predictions and so forth? It comes from academic research. It comes from the research backing that up. These conferences are where the macro ideas sort of actually collide with real world data. Yeah. Another way of thinking about it, it is where the first serious drafts of tomorrow's policy debates are aired. And we're going to give you a front row seat to experience what those initial drafts and debates are actually like. Welcome to the Boston Fed's 69th annual flagship economic conference. When you do research at the regional bank, at the board or at the BIS, you do policy. By policy, we mean, you know, you advise your principles. In our case, that's Susan Collins, the president and CEO of the Boston Fed. preparations for the FOMC meeting for public engagements. That is Egon Sakryek. He's director of the research department at the Boston Fed and he's the one who actually puts this event together and he's Omar's boss. Yeah. And he's Omar's boss, right? He also gets to choose the broad theme of the conference. We've lived in a particular global order, rulesbased, international system, globalizations, trade integrations. We just took those things for granted for decades and we're now grappling with monumental change and we lack models. We lack theoretical frameworks to understand these changes. You you've heard many debates about this data is no good. This is the sausage. Don't eat it. Right? And how does one go about it? So I think it's just it's just really I mean it's an exciting time for researchers because we have great questions. But I think it also underscores of just how little we really know and and and how challenging it is then to to make policy recommendations in the in this in the period of such change. You know the way the conference a conference like that comes together is you know we sit together my my my team of researchers we we try to pick a topic that would obviously be timely relevant to policy makers. We confer with Susan and then so forth. We look you know and so forth. So once we once we kind of zero in on what the topic is, we then have to identify the contributors to this. We have a certain idea of what we want different sessions to be. Then we get either academics or you know contributors to write papers for this. But you know academics researchers write what they want to write. So sometimes there's a bit of a you know say say you know gentlemanlike distance between the blurp and the ultimate paper that gets written but that's all right we've always seen this this is very very standard and you know the idea is then is to the discussence the role of a discussant then is to kind of bring that paper and provide some context and you know try to try to you know fit it into the general theme. So this particular conference the theme has changed right and one of the things we keep saying but I think is true is we are living through capital age history here we have the tariffs from the Trump administration the reversal of globalization new geopolitical risks AI all of it right and we're also still trying to figure out stuff like what happened in relatively recent years why did inflation actually spike during the pandemic we're also in this new era of industrial policy and we're trying to figure out what that means for the economy if we actually want to do the stuff like make semiconductors or build small modular nuclear reactors, we have to have some idea of where we're going and and we try to really keep it, you know, I would say somewhat more accessible. I would say a bit interdisciplinary. We try to reach a bit broader audience is somewhat atypical conference. You know, your typical economic research conference would feature slide after slide of equations, graphs. Sorry, I'm laughing slightly because I saw some equations this morning and the speaker is like oh well as you can see from this slide and I'm thinking I cannot see no idea. Right. Right. So you know so this is I would say this is very light on this. If you you know this is super light on this and so forth. We we urge authors to try to write something that's more I would say policy relevant that that that touches that can be communicated and stuff that rather than very very technical pieces you know that is what the academic journals tend to specialize hopefully it sparks it sparks an idea it sparks a new paper you know it says ah you know what this is an interesting result but I have maybe better data to do that so let me actually or there was there was a testable implication that somebody brought up let me see if I can flesh that out because I think I can provide some that's how knowledge and conferences you know advances it's a very organic a bit of a messy type of affair and you know to be honest many times don't things don't they don't pan out you know I have files and folders full of research ideas that you know never went anywhere but that but you try

and if you want to get a sense of that process and the policy implications of some of this research. Take a listen to the first paper presented at the conference. It's by Shbnam Kmley Oscin. She's the Shriber family professor of economics over at Brown University. I love economists and their their long titles. The John Maynard Kane's chair of the Ludvig vine me's endowed seed at the University of whatever. Kane's chair at the Misi school would be an interesting mix. Anyway, here's Shbnam presenting her paper. It is called global networks risks and the US economy. You know, paper after paper, we realize the issue with the conventional macro open economy view. What is this view? This view takes us as a relatively closed economy because of the low trade shares, exports 10% of GDP, imports 14% of GDP. And that of course combines with the fact that US is governing the world in terms of dollar dominance and deep financial markets. And on top of that US has a amazing central bank as we are all here right now we know that Federal Reserve acts as a global lender of last resort when things go south. The benchmark implication of this view is that US has limited exposure to global risks. We would like to revisit the issue in terms of asking directly how sensitive the US economy to global risks once we account for full global trade, production and finance networks and really think about trades off and counterfactuals and basically revisit this issue that the fact that maybe your trade shares are low. We caught up with Shbnam after her presentation to better understand exactly what she's trying to do here. All right. So yes, we found something different because we work with networks and let me explain what that is. When you say networks again the the the traditional we first going to think about of course the trade networks. Why? Because the trade networks directly linked to supply chains right and we already realized it is those are vulnerable. I mean you know shock after shock starting with the pandemic told us that yes maybe kind of our final goods trade or just if I focus on manufacturing not that big but if I look at the supply chains value chains then US is integrated to that and then that changes the things because that means even in the aggregate number you might not see that big of exports and imports there might be indirect exposure through all those things because when you think a network you You are linked through trade. This is now where we also add to the traditional view. But you also have to think about the financing, right? I mean, so the networks to us is trade networks. Yes, you know, countries buying and selling, sectors buying and selling, firms buying and selling from each other, but also financial networks. I mean, you know, investors investing in companies in other countries, you know, the supply chains financed by different investors in other countries. And on top of that, of course, the production, right? I mean you know so a a a a product right now is assembled in one country designed in another country manufacturing in another country with parts coming from many many countries and skills and knowledge also coming from many many countries. So when you have this type of a comprehensive view of the network global network as trade production and finance then I think US becomes very vulnerable to global shocks and global risks. So you could see why this would be an important area of research for the Fed. Right. Right. And the conventional thinking has always been that the US is kind of insulated from global shocks because it's so big because the dollar is so dominant. External factors it's thought don't really affect the US economy so much right and also we don't actually export that much relatively speaking right we import. So that's the conventional view. But if per Shbnam's research, the US is in fact more exposed to global shocks than previously thought, if it's more intertwined with the network of the global economy through secondord effects, then policy makers should be aware of that. Right? Wasn't clear. This is an enormous body of work spanning, you know, several papers, hundreds of pages, all with many applications and scenarios. That is Aaron Flaugh. He's a principal economist at the Boston Fed and he's also the discussant for this particular paper. The discussant role is really interesting. Yeah, this was probably one of the most fascinating sort of dynamics which I knew existed but didn't quite appreciate how it works. So basically every presenter gets paired with an official discussant whose job is just to interpret and critique frankly the paper for a wider audience. So those are those are my my main comments. I do just want to emphasize that what SENM is doing here is policy relevant research at its finest. It's our profession working at its finest for really answering these very timely questions in ways that that authors are very close to the paper. You wrote this, you know, details and you can see in the presentations, right? They they know inside out and stuff like that. So they provide a presentation. The role really what a discussant does is sort of a essentially let me translate what the author does for the broader audience. Right? A good discussant role is really to sort of reframe the paper, pull out key takeaways, and then provide some constructive, you know, comments. But, um, sometimes things get a little awkward. Definitely awkward, but, you know, everyone is still very polite. Still very polite. Yes. But more on that after this break.

Let's go to another paper. This one is by Tomaso Monichelli. He's a professor of economics at University Bachi and his paper is called Supply Chain Uncertainty, Energy Prices and Inflation. And it is actually about one of our favorite topics, Joe. Supply chains. No, that's right because that's exactly right. So supply chain disruptions can sort of change the state of the economy. So the environment that's our idea where firms make production and pricing decisions, right? And so the key idea is that the the state of the world in which firms operate, right? can can change underlying and so as economists we say the the state of the economy changes even starting from potentially minor events along the supply chain. how we make the example of this apparently small episode like in the sewers canal two years ago sort of a ship container shipping oil and other inputs got stuck for a few days we remember it well literally right but that was that episode sort of got resolved in a few days but I didn't have the time to show the data but then this the effect on transportation disruptions s okay along supply chains lasted for months. Okay, so the analogy here is think of a airport, okay, like a hub, okay, where a lot of flight. So now many airports function as hubs okay of many flights coming from different directions and right you can have a disruption like a single delay on a single flight in the in the in the hub but then this propagates you know along the day and then across many different flights and and amplifying the delay downstream a cascade effect. Yes. So at the heart of Tomasu's research is this sort of very important question. Are supply chain disruptions real? Are they a real thing? Or are they simply manifestations or symptoms of excess demand maybe caused by too much fiscal stimulus? Yeah. So after the pandemic, a lot of people criticized the government for handing out checks to people and businesses helping supposedly to fan inflation. But actually, if small supply chain disruptions can reverberate for longer than previously thought through energy prices or whatever, then per Tamaso's research, they can be a pretty important source of inflation. And the important thing is that it's not the size of the supply chain shock that matters. It's the actual volatility itself, the uncertainty that matters for inflation. Right? So again, I think you know, you could see why this would be of interest to policy makers. Even 5 years after the pandemic, we're still trying to figure out exactly what happened and we'll probably be researching that for years. Totally. Yes. So here in the in our research, we emphasize the interaction. So the complimentarity between shocks to let's say the price of oil. Okay. That typically central banks look at right. But they they have a typical attitude. Let's say normal times. If there are oil shocks, yes, we should monitor that those shocks don't feed are not too persistent. They don't feed onto inflation expectations and so on. But their attitude is typically let's look through. Okay, this oil price all oil prices jump around very much in markets. But here we are saying even the same original let's say oil price shocks or energy gas price shocks they can have a very different amplified effects on inflation. Okay. Depending on whether the state of supply chain is disrupted or not. Okay. So it's it's really the intera. So it's not really that we believe that we emphasize supply chain shocks. We say typical supply shocks like oil shocks or gas price shocks, right? They can get really amplified and in a very persistent way if the underlying conditions of supply chains are disruptive. So that that state of the economy should be monitored and in in those states of the world the central bank should be very very reactive way more reactive to oil shocks or energy price shocks than in periods where supply chain disruptions are minimal.

So that's the basic thrust of the paper and the data seemed to bear Tomaso's thesis out but things got a little awkward when it was time for the discussion. Hi I'm Ludvik Stra. I'm a professor of economics at Harvard. I'm a quantitative macroeconomist. So I try to build models that describe the macroeconomy and can be used for policy analysis and forecasting. I'm a discussant of a paper on supply chain uncertainty and energy shocks and how those two relate to the postcoid inflation episode. Right. As Lidvig puts it, being a discussant is a pretty big commitment. And we should just mention here that neither the researchers nor the discussants are getting paid for their time. They're doing this for other reasons. obviously to contribute to policy, but there's another big motivation that we'll get into in a minute. So, here's Lvig. So, not everybody has time and energy to do this. In my case, I love being at the Boston Fed and I'm close. So, so it's not a big travel to come here. And yeah, so I said yes. And you know about a month before the conference you typically receive the paper and then you spend a significant amount of time I'd say maybe half a week a week in your of your research time with the paper and trying to understand the ins and outs trying to understand the empirics the model and then hopefully give a balanced view of the paper during the discussion and from what we saw at the conference it feels like discussions can have different styles some basically summarize the paper and explain why it's relevant and others others you know maybe pick it apart very critically here's Levik talking about the discussants some tend to be more like what you just mentioned more like the latter that you know pick apart papers and kind of come across as a little bit destructive rather than constructive you know the the last discussion at the conference was a lot more constructive for example and would be you know building off the author's results and you showing them what they could do next with with the paper. Some are very very kind and just praise the results, which I I tend to I tend to try to be in somewhere in between. You know, I tend to shed some critical light on the the author's results if that, you know, is something that I think helps understand the paper, but I also want to be constructive and I want to be kind to the authors, too. So, you know, you want to kind of balance those two sides, I guess. and Ludvig did shed some critical light on Tomaso's research. Suggestions for improvement, we can say, right? Suggestions for improvement, right? That's a a a good way of putting it. So, as the economy reopened, as we had ample fiscal stimulus, and I tend to think that that means we ran up a marginal cost curve, meaning, you know, costs went up just because there was a lot of demand. And so, bottlenecks emerged, ports got clogged. And I think that alone can lead to an increase in what looks like supply chain issues even though they're not really the root cause of things. Now, I still think this paper has has a lot of merits to it, but you know, I tend to think that not all that looks like an energy shock is really truly a shock rather than just a con a consequence of of increased demand. Tomaso also used the Baltic Dry index as a proxy for shipping cost, which as anyone who has spent a bit of time on finance Twitter will tell you is an index that gets criticized a lot. Exactly. And then if if it's just one episode in that time series that's kind of responsible for some of the results, then I would worry about that. Now, I don't know if that's exactly what's going on, but I did play around a little bit and it was not as robust as as, you know, I was maybe hoping it or they were maybe hoping it to be. So, Tracy, speaking of Twitter, you know, look, both you and I are used to getting criticism, right? But even if you're used to it, I think it would be pretty uncomfortable to have your work sort of publicly criticized by one of your peers in front of a big group of peers. Yeah, I would think so, too. Although, Tomaso actually seemed pretty fine with it. No. Okay. So that that you learn learn out of experience through time right that you have to filter the reaction of the audience and get the the good and the bad signals. So first of all I had great comments very useful I both myself and my co-author are very happy the discussion was fantastic I I know him he's a fantastic researcher he's one of the best macroeconomist I admire his researchers I was very happy that he they was pleased with the with the with the paper but also the the audience had very interesting comments that know materially will be very useful for for keeping up with the research and and again sometimes you get some more aggressive comments. But you know there is a there is a sort of there there is an interesting role type of dynamics that happens in academic conferences that you have to internalize. Yeah, Tracy, I really do. I want to go to one of those workshops that you hear about where the, you know, the young the young student or the young professor, maybe someone applying for a job, they're presenting their paper and then the old professor in the back of the room sort of puts on a big show and humiliates them, bring up all these points. That is a very interesting point because Tomaso says the days of older professors publicly humiliating younger students are pretty much over. That happens in sort of a behind secret doors in a way. No, but but especially as of late the profession is discussing that a lot. Yeah. So we we we now are are becoming much more aware that the climate especially in economics much more than in other social sciences or hard sciences that the climate during seminars during presentations especially within closed door seminars might be might be sort of not conducive for for for younger researchers to actually take risks and and and and learn from the audience. So we are becoming way more mindful that it is very important to to you know to keep a to keep a civilized climate in in in research environments. Speaking of civilized climates, we should just mention that things can get pretty heated in the public discussion too, right? So this is also part of it where attendees get a chance to ask questions or often make their own points about the papers being questioned. Many many statements in the form of a question. Yeah, lots of that. And things got a little um I don't want to say combative but loud. They were loud. Things got kind of loud after a paper was presented on the idea of policy tradeoffs. So trade-offs between geopolitical risks and economic risks. Perhaps it's too early to tell. Standard models of the type that Shnam talked about without the nominal rigidities would also predict optimal uniform tariffs that are very high 20 40% range. So the current environment looks pretty good. The voice you hear is Paul Antress. He is a professor at Harvard giving the keynote address on the first day of the conference. According to this models, we are in a sweet spot. I'm not so sure. Why? Because the standard models are models that I think have features that I I think are not in line with many of the things that I see when I look at the data. his presentation, the evolving role of the United States in global value chains. It touched on some of the same areas that Shbnum had covered earlier. And the beauty of a conference like this is that she was sitting right in the audience and she was able to weigh in right then and there. You just raised a couple issues and then I then I realized maybe I wasn't clear during my presentation. I fully agree on the whole firm level and how the input output data we have is kind of this sausage. But I would disagree that we do want to make understand how the sausage made so that we can do better. Right? So the economists were fighting. Well actually I asked Shabbn about this later and here's what she said. Well actually I characterized that as a very healthy debate and little bit also you know the artifact of these conferences where you have 25 minutes to present right. So I didn't have that much time and then of course because I didn't show the parts where we use the firm level data and more you know disciplined the macro model with more you know micro identified elasticities and all that.

Joe, all of this raises the question of why economists choose to do this in the first place. And you know, you spend a huge chunk of time writing a paper. You probably have a few research assistants that are working on it and they could be doing something else and then it gets scrutinized this very publicly. I I I maybe you felt I was I was picking on you. I I I didn't mean to do that. Now, of course, I I take your point. Let me just push back though in the sense that obviously one of the motivations is the policy aspect. Economists I think many of them want to inform policy in an accurate and useful way. That's pretty obvious. But there was also something that I didn't quite realize. Peer review and publishing. People want to be published. Yeah. Look, I get it. Believe me, I get it. Researchers, yes, they want to influence policy. Who doesn't? But they also want to get their papers rubber stamped by other economists and then published in the most prestigious academic journals. And so one thing I wondered is whether there's a tension between, you know, just from the economist perspective, is there some sort of tension between the goal of writing a paper that is actually useful for making better policy or just sort of maximizing your chances of getting into a peer-reviewed journal? Yeah, I think that is a very fair question and Shbnam talked about that too. Yes. No, this is the story of my life. So because this is this is a very serious tension and I'm hoping we will make the best use of these times now we are living in to to change this because yes unfortunately academia publishing values very narrow research and very tightly defined specialized research and that's why economists are in silos right there There are labor economists, they are macroeconomists, they are IIO economists, international economists, finance economists. And generally these groups don't talk to each other much and they just do one thing. But but when you want to do policy relevant research, you talk to policy makers and then you the minute you start talking to policy makers and spend time in policy institutions, you realize these problems don't come like that. Oh, here's a you know problem about you know labor so I need labor economy. Here's a problem about like you know financial market. There's a I mean problem about mother the problems are linked the problems are linked and economics profession actually is is capable of you know answering those problems creating solutions for those problems if you know these insights from these different sub fields come together which is you know what I try to do and I I'm hoping you know which kind of you know academic publishing you know doesn't value that much but I I am you know I'm an optimist I'm hopeful I think these are the times people now coming together writing with each other more and you know realizing this more and more so hopefully um you know we'll we'll go downward to a to a better path on this. Yeah. So as a consumer so if everything you're saying is right so that's awesome. I I I would encourage you to kind of like obviously you want to come in and give some numbers but give us like versions of the model that shut down this down. And you're telling me that real itself generates a lot of things that are not in standard models. So I I'm I'm really excited and I'd like to and and I fully agree. You can do the smoothing as little as you want. That's where the data is going to help you. You need data power, but you have to put this in a macro model. I mean otherwise you are not going to go back to inflation output tradeoff and all these policy questions. You have to put it in% agree with that. So all right, I will I will step in in here. We have a iron cage in there and I have things we'll we'll we'll put that on a on a YouTube. I'll have dinner. You know, Joe, there was in fact one major policy maker in the room along with everyone else and that is Susan Collins. That's right. And there are actually there are two prominent Susan Collins. This one is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and she was there the whole time sitting in the front row. Susan herself actually was an academic. She taught at Harvard and Georgetown and the University of Michigan. Right. There are lots of themes going on. I have to say that I'm struck by the the sense that understanding some of the complexities may change traditional ways of thinking about things. So that's a theme that I'm hearing. So the first paper was really if you if you account for the linkages through networks that include not only trade flows but also financial flows and you know if you and across sectors and countries not just through countries but add the sector component in. we may historically with simpler more traditional models have underestimated the potential for larger more persistent effects of different kinds of shocks. And then similarly the second paper had kind of a similar theme that when you really focus on some of the supply chain connections increases in uncertainty can make a shock have a bigger impact. So putting the different things making those connections that's complicated work. I'm really glad that we have experts who are digging in and able to explain them and present them for us and have us ask questions and try to understand them better. So Susan mentioned ideas and one thing I'm very curious about is how the ideas being presented in these papers actually filter through into policy osmosis. Right. Well, right. I'm sure I'm sure there's some of that, but also like do you think Susan is taking the most interesting paper and attaching it to an email and sending it off to Tom Barkin at the Richmond Fed and being like, "You have to read this." Yeah, I would. Hey, Tom, here's something you might find interesting. Yeah. So, there lots of different ways. So, sometimes um you know, sometimes we have the time to go to each other's conferences and it's hard, right, because we there's a lot going on. So sometimes people sometimes my colleagues will actually be sitting in and hear it from themselves. Some of their research teams are often tuning in whether in person or virtually. Our research teams talk to each other. They're very active relationships. They co-author papers. They're engaged in that way. And certainly if they're things that are really informative for me, I will share them with colleagues in a variety of different ways. Maybe not as much attach the paper. you know, we have a lot to read and to to go through. I would try to distill why I'm really interested, but you know, we're always looking for important ideas, trying to be better informed. That's something that's important to all of us. And again, thank you for joining us for the 69th conference. We're delighted to have OddLots here. So, that was the Boston Fed's research conference. Joe, it was great. But before we go, should tell people how Omar's presentation went. Oh, yeah. So, we started this episode talking to Boston Fed economist Omar Barbierro. And I feel like he was under more pressure than most because he was presenting not just in front of his peers, but in front of his actual boss. actually multiple bosses because there's Susan Collins but also Egon Zakryek. So his boss and his boss's boss. Yeah. And his was actually the last paper of the conference. I thought it went really well. Some interesting insights on that. Thank you very much. Basically what I have to say I think it's an exciting effort. Very impressive data collection and rich set of results. Tomaso I think it's a presentation was very interesting. I think the the the effort also is um is very important and great this is really cool to see I have three three quick uh okay this is this is a great paper and I fully agree with Andrea that this is actually huge work so you didn't even mention but we are also now matching piva to a larger set of uh firms ho that's a good outcome and you know I should just mention Joe we we've obviously been summarizing all these papers because we're trying to compress a day and a half of discussion into I don't know 40 60 minutes but all of these papers are available online at the Boston Fed's website totally and if you want to actually see the conference itself if this episode if if somehow this episode was not enough for you um actually the entire conference is on video so you could see all of the presentations and the discussants and so forth it's all available online but I'm so glad we went because I feel like I have a much better understanding ing of how policy actually develops, how research develops and what economists are kind of aiming for. Totally. So when we went to Boston, you know, in my mind I was thinking like we were there to learn more about economics which of course we did and there were all kinds of interesting ideas on supply chains, inflation, all the stuff we talked about. But it was also and I hadn't appreciated this. It was a sociology trip like we're learning about the sociology of how academic work works the relationship between academic work and policy and stuff which is just one of these things that of course intuitively is very important but I don't think like anyone really thinks about and when you think about like how economists could be under this sort of dual pressure of like do I want to influence policy and is there some cost if I'm focusing on maximizing total published output you could see some real interesting tensions that emerge in that process, right? It's sort of a microcosm of academia, I guess, which we got to study for a day and a half. So, I don't know. Maybe maybe next year we'll be in the room at Jackson Hole. We can hope if anyone at the Kansas City Fed is listening. All right. Uh, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway. You can follow me at Tracy Aloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Big thanks to Susan Collins and the rest of the Boston Fed for inviting us to observe and participate in their conference. And once again, all the people who took the time to chat with us. We really appreciate them. You should go to the Boston Fed's website and really check out those papers and presentations. All of it excellent. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen, Dash Bennett, who actually joined us on the trip. He's at Dashbot and Kalebrooks at Kalebrooks. For more OddLots content, go to bloomberg.com/odlots with a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 247 in our Discord, discord.gg/odlotss. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you want to send us on more sociological trips to research conferences, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely adree. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcast and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.