Dirk Niepelt

On his blog, John Cochrane comments on Harald Uhlig’s tweets and the reaction by Janet Yellen (AEA), other established economists, the Chicago Fed, and the JPE. In the comments, one person provides additional information and another links to the list of signatories.

This lecture series is about "Digital Money and Central Bank Digital Currency" with Dr. Prof. Dirk Niepelt, Director of Study Centre Gerzensee, Foundation of the Swiss National Bank. Associate Professor University Bern. About Central banks already issue digital money, but only to a select group of financial institutions. Central bank digital currency would extend this to households and firms. This column examines the proposal for such currency and assesses the opportunities and...

This lecture series is about "Digital Money and Central Bank Digital Currency" with Dr. Prof. Dirk Niepelt, Director of Study Centre Gerzensee, Foundation of the Swiss National Bank. Associate Professor University Bern. About Central banks already issue digital money, but only to a select group of financial institutions. Central bank digital currency would extend this to households and firms. This column examines the proposal for such currency and assesses the opportunities and risks. It...

VoxEU, June 5, 2020, with Martin Gonzalez-Eiras. HTML. A comparison of epidemiological models for use in economic analyses, based on the CEPR discussion paper.

International Journal of Central Banking. PDF. This paper offers a macroeconomic perspective on the “Reserves for All” (RFA) proposal to let the general public hold electronic central bank money and transact with it. I propose an equivalence result according to which a marginal substitution of outside money (e.g., RFA) for inside money (e.g., deposits) does not affect macroeconomic outcomes. I identify key conditions for equivalence and argue that these conditions likely are...

FAS, 31 May 2020. PDF. Monetary deficit financing is the norm—after all, central banks distribute their profits. Monetary financing occurs in the context of regular open market operations and QE and, hyper charged, with helicopter drops. The question is not whether monetary policy should finance the government, but why it does so, and to what extent. Fiscal and monetary policy are inherently connected; what constitutes monetary policy is defined by objectives.

On the SNB website, Lukas Heim and Christoph Kappeler explain the integration of the financial account, the international investment position and the Swiss financial accounts.

CEPR Discussion Paper 14791, May 2020, with Martin Gonzalez-Eiras. PDF (local copy). We contrast the canonical epidemiological SIR model due to Kermack and McKendrick (1927) with more tractable alternatives that offer similar degrees of “realism” and flexibility. We provide results connecting the different models which can be exploited for calibration purposes. We use the expected spread of COVID-19 in the United States to exemplify our results.

On VoxEU, Refet Gürkaynak and Deborah Lucas argue in favor of helicopter drops to finance the fiscal burden due to Covid-19 and they propose an elegant way to implement such drops without undermining the central bank’s equity position (if regulators accept accounting tricks). The special issue bonds would be zero coupon perpetuities and therefore would not obligate Treasury to any future payments. The legislation would require the Fed to buy these bonds from the banks at par. The...

On Coin Center’s blog, Matthew Green and Peter van Valkenburgh write: Censorship resistance is the only way to guarantee that a digital asset truly is “bearer” and can be sent directly from one person to another without reliance on a third party. Cryptocurrencies achieve this property by making network participants (miners) compete for the power to add transactions to the ledger. Even if some miners wish to censor a transaction, we assume that others will not, particularly if it means...