Dirk Niepelt

At an MIT book launch in Zurich, David Shrier and Alex Pentland advertized a new book co-edited by them, “New Solutions for Cybersecurity.” Some takeaways from the event: The really dangerous cyber attacks are yet to come. All major governments are directly or indirectly involved. A promising strategy of minimizing risks relies on (i) continuous encryption; (ii) no central storage of data but case by case requests for data; and (iii) log queries to manage/monitor access. The European...

In a CEPR discussion paper, Christoph Trebesch and Jeromin Zettelmeyer argue that ECB bond buying had a large impact on the price of short and medium maturity bonds … However, the effects were limited to those sovereign bonds actually bought. We find little evidence for positive effects on market quality, or spillovers to close substitute bonds, CDS markets, or corporate bonds. A multiple equilibria view of the crisis would probably suggest otherwise.

A concise overview with timeline.

A new book by Bryan Caplan. It’s the signalling case.

In the NZZ, Monica Rüthers writes about the history of the border between Konstanz (in Germany) and Kreuzlingen (in Switzerland). Shoppers have been crossing the border for ages although governments have tried to prevent this with varying fervor. Exchange rate regimes have affected which goods are bought, where.

In the NZZ, Peter Fischer reports that SNB president Thomas Jordan rejects the Vollgeld initiative and stops short of endorsing the ‘reserves for all’ proposal. … wehrt sich die Nationalbank auch gegen Vorschläge aus akademischen Kreisen, die von der Nationalbank fordern, nicht mehr nur Banken, sondern auch direkt den Schweizer Bürgern elektronisches Zentralbankgeld zur Verfügung zu stellen. Am einfachsten ginge dies, wenn jedermann bei der SNB ein Konto halten könnte. Jordan warnt...

On Alphaville, Kadhim Shubber reports that just a few marketplaces handle the vast majority of illicit drugs-vs.-bitcoin trades. In short, the illicit bitcoin ecosystem is centered around a small number of services that could be subject to scrutiny, regulation and co-option by law enforcement. It’s a wild west, but luckily for the police all the bad guys are hanging out at a single saloon.

Kurt Gödel. John von Neumann. Albert Einstein.

The World Bank’s Doing Business project claims to provide objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level. In the Wall Street Journal, Josh Zumbrun and Ian Talley report that the ranking must be revised. Over time, World Bank staff put a heavy thumb on the scales of its report by repeatedly changing the methodology that was used to calculate the country rankings, Mr. Romer said. The focus of...

Economics is not about predicting stock markets, exchange rates, or GDP. Its aim is to make sense of human interaction in the small and the large. Marek Hlavac’s online course Nobel Prize-Winning Contributions to Economics provides an overview over the work of deep economic thinkers.