Three rising economists, three surprising results. From the CEPR/Paris School of Economics Policy Forum 2026, host Tim Phillips talks to three early-career researchers about the work that’s challenging conventional wisdom.
Guido Lamarmora (University of Nottingham) shows that once you account for land, poor countries aren’t actually bad at farming, and that raising agricultural productivity or opening to trade can deepen agricultural specialisation rather than shrink it. Costanza Tomaselli (Imperial College London) uses a natural experiment from Mexico to reveal how access to credit, not government subsidies, shapes the way firms survive energy shocks. And Mushegh Tovmasyan (University Paris-Saclay) mines detailed Armenian trade data to show how sanctions on Russia triggered a trade boom, new partnerships, and a reshaping of who trades with whom.
Plus: what these three PhD researchers think economics students should (and shouldn’t) be using AI for.



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