Dirk Niepelt

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...

Beschlüsse der EZB zum Staatsanleihekaufprogramm kompetenzwidrig. Critical discussion on Verfassungsblog by Alexander Thiele. Critical Twitter thread by Jean-Pierre Landau.

Links provided by Wanderu.

In the NZZ, Matthias Müller reports how China’s CBDC plans progress: In China beginnen nun im Viertel Xiangcheng, das zu der unweit von Schanghai gelegenen Millionenstadt Suzhou gehört, in einem geschlossenen System erste Tests. … Die PBoC dürfte ein zweistufiges System entwickelt haben. Auf der ersten Ebene wird die digitale Währung an die Geschäftsbanken ausgegeben. Auf der zweiten Ebene können dann die Haushalte und Unternehmen den digitalen Yuan abheben und verwenden. … In Suzhou...

Covid Economics, April 2020, with Martin Gonzalez-Eiras. PDF. We embed a lockdown choice in a simplified epidemiological model and derive formulas for the optimal lockdown intensity and duration. The optimal policy reflects the rate of time preference, epidemiological factors, the hazard rate of vaccine discovery, learning effects in the health care sector, and the severity of output losses due to a lockdown. In our baseline specification a Covid-19 shock as currently experienced by the...

IDEAS/RePEc’s Economics Virtual Seminar Calendar aggregates information. Some selected seminar series: Virtual macro seminar Princeton BCF HELP! Global virtual seminar series on FinTech Virtual digital economy seminar

What’s left? The new plans envision Several stablecoins tied to existing fiat currencies rather than (or in addition to) to the originally planned currency basket. No more “permissionless” transactions, no more “censorship resistance.” Vetting of new wallets by the operator (KYC, AML). The new Libra White Paper. Teunis Brosens and Carlo Cozucco in ING’s THINK. Kiran Stacey and Hannah Murphy in the FT. Philip Sandner and Jonas Gross in Medium.

Promising to do “whatever it takes” in order to avert a bad equilibrium is very different from printing money when the problem is a lack of resources, or their distribution. See Gilles Saint-Paul’s “Whatever it Takes.”