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The author Dirk Niepelt
Dirk Niepelt
Dirk Niepelt is Director of the Study Center Gerzensee and Professor at the University of Bern. A research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London), CESifo (Munich) research network member and member of the macroeconomic committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik, he served on the board of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics and was an invited professor at the University of Lausanne as well as a visiting professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University.

Dirk Niepelt

Julian Baggini’s “Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will”

In his book, Julian Baggini points out that materialism, not determinism, undermines the notion of free will. He accepts that man is subject to the laws of nature but simultaneously seems to argue for a holistic model of man and human choice. He concludes that the concept of free will is consistent with predetermined causes; with unconscious choice; and that it does not require that a choice could have been different. Discussion in The Guardian.

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Douglas Adams’ “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”

In Douglas Adams’ book (volume one in the trilogy of four) we learn, among other things: Towels are particularly useful for interstellar travelers on a shoestring. It’s not clear whether humans conduct experiments on mice or vice versa. The answer to Life, Universe, and Everything is “forty-two” as Deep Thought found after an extended period (seven and a half million years) of number crunching. But what is the question? To find out, an even more powerful computer was built: The Earth....

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Stable Long-Run Money Demand

On VoxEU, Luca Benati, Robert Lucas, Juan Pablo Nicolini, and Warren Weber argue that long-run money demand in many countries is rather stable. … using a specific, narrow monetary aggregate, M1, we study a dataset comprising 32 countries since the mid-19th century (Benati et al. 2016). The main finding of this large-scale investigation is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, in most cases statistical tests do identify with high confidence a long-run equilibrium relationship between...

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On the Performance of Swiss Portfolio Managers

In the NZZ, Michael Schaefer reports on a study about the performance of Swiss portfolio managers in 2016. The median portfolio returns in all investment strategies except those not investing in stocks fell short of the corresponding benchmark returns. Only a fifth of the portfolios generated returns in excess of their benchmark. These numbers do not yet account for management fees. No portfolio manager generated high returns across all strategies. But some managers consistently generate...

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America’s Miserable 21st Century

In Commentary, Nicholas Eberstadt recounts how low employment, deteriorating health, and declining social mobility in the United States foreshadow a “Miserable 21st Century.” Between 2000 and 2016, the work rate for Americans aged 20 or older fell by almost 5 percentage points, to 60 percent. In the “prime working age” group, it fell by almost 4 percentage points. While work rates for men had been falling for much longer, a similar decline for prime age women set in in 2000. Death rates...

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Stability vs. Equality?

In The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel argues that over thousands of years, only mass violence and catastrophes have triggered significant reductions in inequality. From the book’s introduction: For thousands of years, civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. … stability favored economic inequality. This was as true of Pharaonic Egypt as it was of Victorian England, as true of the Roman Empire as of the United States. … Four different kinds of violent ruptures have...

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Money, Banking, and Dreams

In another excellent post on Moneyness, J P Koning likens the monetary system to the plot in the movie Inception, featuring a dream piled on a dream piled on a dream piled on a dream. Koning explains that [l]ike Inception, our monetary system is a layer upon a layer upon a layer. Anyone who withdraws cash at an ATM is ‘kicking’ back into the underlying central bank layer from the banking layer; depositing cash is like sedating oneself back into the overlying banking layer. Monetary...

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