Dirk Niepelt

An excellent conference organized by the Monetary Law Forum Switzerland focused on blockchain use cases from a central bank perspective. Program, links to slides. I discussed the macroeconomic perspective and argued for “reserves for all.” Some related links: Nivaura and Allen & Overy (backing Nivaura). OTC Swiss Blockchain, by Roman Bischoff.

How light emissions across the globe changed between 2012 and 2016. Link to a navigable map.

University of Copenhagen, Department of Economics Discussion Paper 17-18, July 2017, with Martin Gonzalez-Eiras. PDF. We propose a theory of tax centralization and intergovernmental grants in politico-economic equilibrium. The cost of taxation differs across levels of government because voters internalize general equilibrium effects at the central but not at the local level. The equilibrium degree of tax centralization is determinate even if expenditure-related motives for centralization...

Jointly with the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, the St. Louis Fed, the University of Bern and the Swiss National Bank, the Study Center Gerzensee organized a conference on Fiscal and Monetary Policies. The program can be viewed here.

Greg Mankiw offers a simple example to establish that a reduction in the tax rate on capital income (in a closed economy) raises wages in the long run. John Cochrane patiently typed the solution. And Larry Summers argues on his blog that US realities are not well captured by Mankiw’s example.

On his blog, John Cochrane argues that banks could, and should be 100% equity financed. His points are: (1) There are plenty of safe assets—government debt—out there and banks do not need to “create” additional safe assets—deposits. I share this view partly. First, I don’t know what amount of safe assets are sufficient from a social point of view. Second, I don’t consider government debt to be a safe asset. Third, debt has safety and liquidity properties. The question is not only whether...

On Alphaville, Matthew Klein points out that covered interest parity (dollar vs. yen) is alive and kicking again. It wasn’t during much of 2016. The Reserve Bank of Australia exploited the arbitrage opportunity. Previous post on the topic, and another one.

NBER Working Paper 23864, September 2017, with Tamon Asonuma and Romain Ranciere. PDF. (Local copy.) Rejecting a common assumption in the sovereign debt literature, we document that creditor losses (“haircuts”) during sovereign restructuring episodes are asymmetric across debt instruments. We code a comprehensive dataset on instrument-specific haircuts for 28 debt restructurings with private creditors in 1999–2015 and find that haircuts on shorter-term debt are larger than those on debt...

In an NBER working paper and a column on VoxEU, Michael Bordo and Andrew Levin make the case for central bank issued digital currency (CBDC). Bordo and Levin favor an account-based CBDC system (managed or supervised by the central bank) rather than central bank issued tokens in the blockchain. They emphasize the Friedman rule and the fact that interest paying CBDC affords the possibility to satisfy the rule: These … goals – … a stable unit of account and an efficient medium of exchange –...

On Alphaville, Izabella Kaminska questions the utility settlement coin project (for an update on the project, see Martin Arnold’s recent FT article). She suspects that USC isn’t really a blockchain project as much as a market infrastructure project — even if it leans on blockchain jargon for the purpose of gaining popular momentum. … On paper, the technology promises to un-encumber cash collateral by creating a much more reliable form of distributed settlement, requiring a fraction of the...