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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

Good and Bad International Commitments

On his blog, Dani Rodrik argues that the fact that an international rule is negotiated and accepted by a democratically elected government does not inherently make that rule democratically legitimate. Rodrik distinguishes two types of international commitments. On the one hand, there are commitments that help to overcome time-inconsistency problems. [For example, the government] would like to commit to free trade or to fiscal balance, but realizes that over time it will give in to...

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Owner-Occupied Housing and Wealth Inequality

On VoxEU, Gianni La Cava summarizes his research on the secular rise in the housing share of US income. In the US national accounts, income accruing to the housing sector is measured as ‘net housing capital income’, or simply, net rental income (i.e. gross rents less housing costs, such as depreciation and property taxes). This measure includes rental income going to both owner-occupiers (imputed rent) and landlords (market rent). The very detailed nature of the Bureau of Economic...

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Pawn Shops, Information Insensitivity, and Debt-on-Debt

In a BIS working paper (January 2015), Bengt Holmstrom summarizes some of the implications of the research on information insensitive debt. He cautions against moves to increase transparency in debt markets and defends the shadow banking system. He explains why opacity and information insensitivity are valuable and argues that debt-on-debt arrangements are (privately) optimal. It all started with pawn shops: The beauty lies in the fact that collateralised lending obviates the need to...

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“Central Banking and Bitcoin: Not yet a Threat,” VoxEU, 2016

VoxEU, October 19, 2016. HTML. Central banks are increasingly interested in employing blockchain technologies. The blockchain threatens the intermediation business. Central banks encounter the blockchain in the form of new krypto currencies, and as the technology underlying new clearing and settlement systems. Krypto currencies bear the risk of “dollarization,” but in the major currency areas this risk is still small. New clearing and settlement systems benefit from central bank...

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“Causes of the Transformation of the US Fiscal System in the 1930s,” VoxEU, 2016

VoxEU, October 11, 2016, with Martin Gonzalez-Eiras. HTML. The US fiscal system underwent a radical transformation around the time of the Great Depression. Perceived cost differences of revenue collection across levels of government, due to general equilibrium effects, can partly explain the rise of tax centralization and intergovernmental grants. We develop a micro-founded general equilibrium model that blends politics and macroeconomics. (See the working paper.)

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Nobel Laureates? École Normale Supérieure

In Nature, Tom Clynes reports about research indicating that École Normale Supérieure has the highest proportion of undergraduates that eventually win a Nobel prize. The California Institute of Technology comes second ahead of Harvard, Swarthmore, Cambridge, École Polytechnique, MIT, Columbia, Amherst, and Chicago.

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Are We Real?

In the Guardian, Olivia Solon reports about the discussion on whether life as we experience it likely is a simulation. Pro: … videogames are becoming more and more sophisticated and in the future we’ll be able to have simulations of conscious entities inside them. … If there are many more simulated minds than organic ones, then the chances of us being among the real minds starts to look more and more unlikely. … That we might be in a simulation is … a simpler explanation for our existence...

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On Hygge and Gemütlichkeit

The Economist suggests that Danish Hygge (or German Gemütlichkeit) might go hand in hand with exclusion of strangers. Denmark’s own natives may rank it top for happiness, but the immigrants in the survey [among expatriates] ranked it 60th in terms of friendliness, 64th for being made to feel welcome, and 67th for the ease of finding friends. … If cultures are obsessed with the joys of relaxing with old friends, perhaps it is because they find it stressful to make new ones.

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Triple Coincidence in International Finance

On VoxEU, Stefan Avdjiev, Robert McCauley, and Hyun Song Shin discuss how a focus on net capital flows between countries can mislead policy analysts if they neglect heterogeneity between sectors in a country and/or non-congruence of economic and currency area that is, if they assume the “triple coincidence” between economic area, decision-making unit, and currency area. The triple coincidence misleads because it obscures gross flows, … in that it gives insufficient weight to international...

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