Dirk Niepelt

In the NZZ, Ulrich von Schwerin reports about the Zoroastrian heritage in Iran. More on Zoroastrianism.

The NZZ compares salaries of central bank governors. Switzerland comes first.

In a CEPR discussion paper, Jan van Ours and Yuxin Yao conclude that in the Netherlands, for male workers there is a significant wage penalty of dialect-speaking while for female workers there is no significant difference.

Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker.

The Economist reports about a new digital currency platform, Zcash. The platform could handle more transactions than for example, Bitcoin. The open-source project backed by outside investors offers confidentiality: Bitcoin obscures the identity of currency owners, but the “blockchain”, the ledger that keeps track of all the coins, is open and can be analysed to see the flows of funds. This is a serious barrier for banks: blockchains could reveal their trading strategies and information...

In the New Yorker, Caleb Crain reviews the case. It’s a difficult case to make if most voters are uninformed. Jamming the stub of the Greek word for “knowledge” into the Greek word for “rule,” Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable.” It’s an idea that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid...

On VoxEU, Kevin Bryan nicely summarizes progress and the lack of it in developing theories of the firm.

On Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok reports based on a NY Times feature that genetically modified crops do not deliver what they were expected to.

Jointly with the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Swiss National Bank, the Study Center Gerzensee organized a conference in honor of Bob King, long-term supporter of the Study Center. Program: PDF. Jaume Ventura’s discussion of a paper on trade and growth by Alvarez and Lucas: PDF. My discussion of a paper on debt and debt constraints by Bhandari, Evans, Golosov, and Sargent: PDF.

From the NZZ: