Dirk Niepelt

An American professor’s perspective as reported on Irwin Collier’s Economics in the Rear-View Mirror: On an October morning, some years since, a recent Vermont graduate and I entered together the Aula of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University at Berlin. Lectures were still two weeks away; but Germany is a country of leisurely beginnings and this was the morning of matriculation. The great hall was thronged with an interesting company. At a long table sat the Rector Magnificus, Harnack, the...

WKO guest professor at the University of Vienna. Public event on 19 January.

MA course at the University of Bern. Time: Monday, 12.15 – 14.00. Location: UniS, A027. Uni Bern’s official course page. TA: Remo Taudien. This course covers macroeconomic theories of fiscal policy (including tax and debt policy) and the interaction between fiscal and monetary policy. Participants should be familiar with the material covered in the course Macroeconomics II. The course grade reflects the final exam grade. The classes follow selected chapters in the textbook Macroeconomic...

BA course at the University of Bern. Time: Monday, 10:15–12:00. Location: UniS, S101. Uni Bern’s official course page. The course targets students who have completed their mandatory training in microeconomics, macroeconomics and mathematics and who are interested to make use of macroeconomic theory in order to analyze questions related to asset prices, bubbles, government debt, or the link between fiscal and monetary policy. The grade may depend on participation in class; small group...

In one of the eBooks that CEPR published in 2022 several authors draw first conclusions. From the introduction by Jonathan Portes: The analyses in this eBook are very much a preliminary and incomplete account of the economic impacts of Brexit. In some cases, they raise as many questions as they answer.For example, why have UK imports of EU goods fallen so sharply, while UK exports are much less affected, when (in contrast to the EU) the UK has not yet introduced the full panoply of...

With Tamon Asonuma and Romain Ranciere. Journal of International Economics 140, 103689, January 2023. PDF. We document that creditor losses (”haircuts”) during sovereign debt restructurings vary across debt maturity. In our novel dataset on instrument-specific haircuts suffered by private creditors in 1999-‒2020 we find larger losses on short- than long-term debt, independently of the specific haircut measure we use. A standard asset pricing model rationalizes our findings under two...

At the BIS 21st Annual Conference in June I discussed work by Alfred Lehar and Christine Parlour on “Systemic fragility in decentralised markets.” The paper and my discussion have now been issued as BIS working paper 1062.

The New York Times collects background information about failures in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Lucas Kyriacou has posted a Jupyter notebook with a great introduction to Python. From the readme file: This course aims to introduce PhD students to the basics of the popular and powerful programming language called Python. After going through the basics, we will also see some applications such as OLS regression, extraction of information from textual data, data visualization and object-oriented programming. In an extended version of this course we will further discuss various...

In an NBER working paper, Jessica Bai, Matthew Esche, W. Bentley MacLeod and Yifan Shi argue: We introduce a model of the admissions process based upon standard agency theory and explore its implications with economics PhD admissions data from 2013-2019. We show that a subjective score that aggregates subjective ratings and recommendation letter features plays a more important role in determining admissions than an objective score based upon graduate record exam (GRE) scores. Subjective...