He read the White House spreadsheet line by line. The decimal point was in the wrong place, and a trillion-dollar trade policy hung on it.
In April 2025, the most talked-about number in American trade policy did not come from the Treasury or the U.S. Trade Representative. It came from a footnote-deep blog post co-authored by an economist who spends his days at a conservative think tank that, in theory, should have been cheering the administration on. Stan Veuger and his AEI colleague Kevin Corinth had reverse-engineered the formula behind President Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs - and found that someone had used the wrong elasticity. The tariffs, they argued, were inflated by roughly a factor of four.
It was the kind of finding that travels. Axios, Fortune, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, CNN - all picked it up within days. Here was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an institution not known for reflexive Trump-bashing, calmly explaining that the math behind the signature economic policy of the moment did not, on its own terms, add up. He was not arguing ideology. He was arguing arithmetic.
That is the Veuger move. He is a Dutch-born, Harvard-trained economist who edits AEI Economic Perspectives, teaches at Harvard, and treats public debate as a place where claims get checked rather than chanted. His research lands in The Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Monetary Economics. His commentary lands in Foreign Affairs and USA Today. And somewhere in between, he once published a serious academic paper proving that LeBron James is, measurably, good for the restaurant business.
The detail that made the tariff story stick was not its conclusion but its receipts. Veuger and Corinth did not say the tariffs felt too high; they pointed to a specific paper by Alberto Cavallo and coauthors and showed that the formula had grabbed the elasticity of retail prices to tariffs - around 0.25 - when the relevant quantity was the response of import prices, closer to 0.945. Cavallo's research had been explicit on the distinction: tariffs pass through almost fully to U.S. import prices, with murkier evidence at the cash register. Confuse the two, and the implied foreign tariff rates balloon by about fourfold. The error was that small and that consequential.
What gives the work its edge is the venue it came from. AEI is a center-right institution, and Veuger is a conservative-leaning economist by professional home. A critique of Trump trade policy from the Brookings left would have been filed under predictable. A critique from inside the conservative tent, sourced and quantified, was harder to wave away - which is why the story ran everywhere from Fortune to the Daily Beast and onto cable news within seventy-two hours.
"The formula does not make economic sense." Veuger & Corinth, AEI, on the reciprocal tariffs
The administration's formula needed a single value: how much import prices move when tariffs change. The cited research pointed to roughly 0.945. The formula used 0.25 - a number drawn from how retail prices respond, not import prices. Veuger and Corinth showed the confusion inflated the implied foreign tariff rates roughly fourfold. Their illustration: corrected, the Vietnam levy would have been about 12.2% instead of 46%.
Figures from the AEI analysis by Stan Veuger and Kevin Corinth, April 2025. Veuger later joined more than 40 economists in an amicus brief arguing the tariffs were also unlawful.
At AEI he works on macroeconomics, political economy, public economics and urban economics - the unglamorous machinery of how governments tax, spend, and distort. The tariff post was that machinery applied in real time.
He edits AEI Economic Perspectives and writes for general audiences in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, The New York Times and USA Today, translating dense economics into arguments people can actually follow.
A visiting lecturer in Harvard's Department of Economics and an affiliate of its Center for American Political Studies, he keeps one foot in the academy that trained him.
His work appears in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics and The Review of Economics and Statistics - the rooms where economists grade each other's homework.
A fellow at Madrid's IE School and at Tilburg University, and a director of the Netherland-America Foundation, he carries his European training into Washington's debates.
He comments on popular culture as readily as on monetary policy - and occasionally turns a sports storyline into a published research design.
There is a version of economic commentary that is mostly mood - tariffs are good, tariffs are bad, pick a jersey. Veuger works the other side of the street. The reciprocal-tariff post did not open with a verdict; it opened with the administration's own logic, took that logic seriously, and then followed it to the place where it broke. He has noted, repeatedly, that a country's trade deficit is not set by tariffs alone but by capital flows, supply chains, comparative advantage and geography - which is why a formula that treats the deficit as a pure tariff signal was always going to misfire.
That patience is the point. By granting the policy its premises and still finding the math wrong, he made a conclusion that was very hard to dismiss as partisan. The follow-on was almost inevitable: when the legal challenges arrived, Veuger was among more than forty economists signing briefs arguing the reciprocal tariffs were not just ill-designed but unlawful, and he kept writing through the litigation as the question moved toward the courts.
It is the same instinct that produced the LeBron paper. Most people watching a superstar change teams see sports. Veuger and Shoag saw a research design - a sharp, datable shock to a single city, repeated twice, with a clean control built into the timeline. The trick in both cases is identical: find the moment where a messy real-world event behaves like a controlled experiment, then count carefully.
For readers, the payoff is an economist who explains rather than asserts. He writes for Foreign Affairs and The National Interest, edits a journal aimed at making policy economics legible, and lectures at Harvard - all variations on the same job of turning a model into a sentence a non-economist can hold.
Most economists collect a bachelor's, a master's, a PhD, and stop. Veuger appears to have collected fields the way other people collect stamps - law in London, business in Rotterdam, Spanish literature in Utrecht - before settling the matter at Harvard.
Co-authors "Taking My Talents to South Beach (and Back)" with Daniel Shoag, turning LeBron James' free-agency moves into a natural experiment on local economic spillovers.
Serves as visiting lecturer of economics at Harvard University.
With Kevin Corinth, publishes the AEI analysis exposing the factor-of-four error in the reciprocal tariff formula. National coverage follows within days.
Joins 40-plus economists urging the courts to find the reciprocal tariffs unlawful, and keeps writing on the policy's economics and legality.
When James left Cleveland for Miami and came back, Veuger and Daniel Shoag saw what most fans missed: a clean before-and-after. They counted the eating-and-drinking establishments near each arena. The verdict, peer-reviewed and unsentimental - a superstar is local stimulus you can measure in storefronts.
The paper, "Taking My Talents to South Beach (and Back)," landed as a Harvard Kennedy School working paper in 2017 and later in the journal Sport in Society. It got picked up by Marginal Revolution, CNBC and the Boston sports press - economists nodding at the identification strategy, fans delighting in a number that confirmed what every bar owner near an arena already suspected. It is a small masterpiece of the genre Veuger keeps returning to: take something people argue about with their gut, and settle a piece of it with data.