Dirk Niepelt

On German TV, Dieter Nuhr analyzes the German mindset (Nuhr im Wandel). He offers many insights into why Germans (and their government) stand in their own way. One reason is that Germans can deal with change but still fear it.

Goodreads rating 4.36. Spiritual enlightenment is not about mysticism or happiness, although the latter might follow from the former. It is not about the “true self” but about the non-self; about radical questioning and truth seeking that ditches all putative certainties; about watching the unfolding of life with joy and interest; about accepting contradictions.

Goodreads rating 4.06. Human beings have their personal models of the world. These models are wrong and sometimes very wrong, leaving people with the impression that they have no choice, are being excluded, etc. The authors argue that successful psychotherapies and -therapists all use similar methods to help clients change and correct their models, opening new perspectives for them. In the book the authors systematize this argument. They emphasize errors that humans make when...

Goodreads rating 3.81. For someone living in two dimensions and becoming aware of three, it might be easier to think of four than for someone living in three dimensions. The cherished feeling of oneness might be misleading … That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them;...

In the AEJ: Economic Policy, Christopher Hoy and Franziska Mager report that people are less supportive of redistribution when they learn that they are poorer than they thought. We test a key assumption underlying seminal theories about preferences for redistribution, which is that relatively poor people should be the most in favor of redistribution. … people who are told they are relatively poorer than they thought are less concerned about inequality and are not more supportive of...

The Economist reports on “The race to redefine cross-border finance:” SWIFT recently launched SWIFT Go for retail payments. FinTech firms often partly bypass SWIFT by aggregating payments first. Ripple evades SWIFT, using a cryptocurrency for international transactions. Credit card companies build infrastructure independent of SWIFT for retail (push) payments initiated by the sender. JPMorgan Chase and a Singaporean bank and Temasek launched Partior for wholesale payments. This...

After 12 years of service Dirk Niepelt resigns as the director of the Study Center to take up a post as Full Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Bern. The Governing Board and Foundation Council thank him for the outstanding achievements of the centre under his leadership. He has played a major role in building up the Study Center Gerzensee as a place of learning and a venue for academic research and dialogue, in preparing it to meet future challenges, and in bolstering...

Keynote Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dirk Niepelt zum Thema: CBDC — makroökonomische oder politische Risiken? WEIS[S]ER SALON, 13.09.2021

The FT (and many other outlets) summarize a report by law firm WilmerHale which was commissioned by the World Bank: … in the 2018 edition of Doing Business, China’s overall ranking had been artificially held at 78 — the same as in the previous year — as a result of late changes that elevated its position from 85. The report alleges that Georgieva led efforts to improve China’s ranking at a time when she was “engrossed” in a campaign to secure a capital increase for the World Bank. …...

The research policy network on Fintech and Digital Currencies has an ever-expanding list of issues for its researchers. Dirk Niepelt of the University of Bern, RPN director, explains what's top of the agenda for central banks and policymakers, and how the RPN can influence their decisions.