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...
Read More »Contagion in Decentralized Markets
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.
Read More »Failures in Russia’s War Against Ukraine
The New York Times collects background information about failures in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Read More »Lucas Kyriacou’s “Python for Macroeconomists”
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...
Read More »Economics PhD Admissions
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...
Read More »Most-Regretted College Majors
Source: CNBC.
Read More »Robert Wolff’s “Original Wisdom”
Goodreads rating 4.37. Wolff describes his experiences in rural Malaysia and in the jungle among the Sng’oi, where he learns (rather than being taught) new forms of awareness and knowledge. I saw clearly—perhaps for the first time—that most people, even scientists, can see the world only from one point of view: their own. [p. 146] Malay culture values halus—soft, gentle, polite—and despises kasar.
Read More »“Sovereign Bond Prices, Haircuts and Maturity,” UniBe, 2022
With Tamon Asonuma and Romain Ranciere. UniBe Discussion Paper 22-13, November 2022. 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 assumptions, both...
Read More »Mortality Externalities of CO2-Emissions
In the Quarterly Journal of Economics (137, 4), a group of authors estimates that the mean global increase in mortality risk due to climate change, accounting for adaptation benefits and costs, is valued at roughly 3.2% of global GDP in 2100 under a high-emissions scenario. Notably, today’s cold locations are projected to benefit, while today’s poor and hot locations have large projected damages. Finally, our central estimates indicate that the release of an additional ton of CO2 today...
Read More »Mariana: CBDCs in Automated Market Makers
Three BIS innovation hubs plan to test DeFi inspired liquidity pools to exchange wCBDCs. BIS press release: Project Mariana will use DeFi protocols to automate foreign exchange markets and settlement. Automated market makers can become the basis for new generation of financial infrastructure. Exploration on cross-border exchange of wholesale CBDCs is the first to involve three Hub centres. The BIS Innovation Hub is launching a new project around central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)...
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