Dirk Niepelt

On his (Le Monde) blog, Thomas Piketty emphasizes that labor productivity in France and Germany is as high as in the US, and much higher than in Italy or the UK (his figures here and here).

Ted Honderich’s The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website.

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Causal Determinism, Carl Hoefer suggests in the concluding section (Determinism and Human Action) that there is hope for those who want to believe in free will: There is a long tradition of compatibilists arguing that freedom is fully compatible with physical determinism; a prominent recent defender is John Fischer (1994, 2012). Hume went so far as to argue that determinism is a necessary condition for freedom—or at least, he argued that...

On Moneyness, JP Koning argues that India’s demonetization experiment could have suffered from fewer frictions if bank notes had been overstamped rather than immediately withdrawn.

The Local reports that in order to cut costs, Denmark’s parliament passed a bill in December that will lead to the imposition of an “education cap.” The bill restricts individuals who already have a higher education degree from pursuing a degree in another field at the same or a lower level.

In Econometrica, Emmanuel Farhi and Iván Werning neatly summarize how their work on demand externalities fits in the literature. … pecuniary externalities, which were first shown to arise when a simple friction, market incompleteness, is introduced into the Arrow–Debreu framework (see, e.g., Hart (1975), Stiglitz (1982), Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis (1985), Geanakoplos, Magill, Quinzii, and Dreze (1990)). The logic is as follows. When asset markets are incomplete and there is more than...

In the New York Times, Max Fisher reviews why the Two State Solution hasn’t happened.

In the Journal of Economic Literature, William Roberds reviews Christine Desan’s “Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism” and he provides his own perspective on European monetary history. … the transition of the Bank of England’s notes from the status of experimental debt securities (in 1694) to “as good as gold” (1833) required more than a century of legal accommodation and business comfort with their use. Desan emphasizes England’s traditions of nominalism (as...

Die Volkswirtschaft 1–2 2017, December 21, 2016. HTML, PDF. Banning inside money creation would be unnecessary, insufficient, not enforceable, and besides the point. The way forward is to grant everyone access to central bank reserves and let investors choose between reserves and deposits.

In the Guardian, Jon Henley reports about Switzerland’s new immigration law. The Swiss parliament rejected quotas on EU workers, contrary to what a 2014 referendum demanded. Instead, the new law requires that residents be given priority in new job vacancies. [C]ross-border commuters to Swiss jobs, plus EU residents in Switzerland, will be able to register with a Swiss job centre and get the same treatment as Swiss citizens.