Dirk Niepelt

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 17, 2022. PDF. The federal council’s digital finance strategy focuses on regulation. There are limits to this strategy when financial markets operate globally and virtually. Preserving monetary sovereignty requires an attractive national currency. Carrots, not only sticks. An attractive currency is not only stable but also usable in digital form.

CEPR and SUERF webinar moderated by me. Markus Brunnermeier and Jean-Pierre Landau present their report for the European Parliament. Youtube.

Goodreads rating 4.19. A sweeping novel of 950 pages (!) which starts on page 960. The Nobel laureate describes hundreds of characters, with even more names; immerses in countless locations, languages, and creeds. Her protagonists always remain strangers. There is something wonderful in being a stranger, in being foreign, something to be relished, something as alluring as candy. It is good not to be able to understand a language, not to know the customs, to glide like a spirit among...

The new edition features an interview with Javier Bianchi. PDF. It is “my” last Newsletter since I left the Center yesterday.

On the question whether the Fed should seriously consider retail CBDC, the FT sides with the pro camp. While elsewhere such central bank digital currencies can appear “a solution in search of a problem”, America’s lacklustre retail banking system and the importance of the dollar in cross-border money flows make an obvious case for reform. Compare the contributions by Darrell Duffie and Chris Waller in the CEPR eBook.

CEPR Discussion Paper 16906, January 2022, with Martin Gonzalez-Eiras. PDF (local copy). We investigate how politico-economic factors shaped government responses to the spread of COVID-19. Our simple framework uses epidemiological, economic and politico-economic arguments. Confronting the theory with US state level data we find strong evidence for partisanship even when we control for fundamentals including the electorate’s political views. Moreover, we detect an important role for the...

Wirtschaft Regional, January 7, 2022. PDF. Interview on private and public money, digital payments, Bitcoin, cash.

Wirtschaft Regional, January 7, 2022. PDF. Interview on private and public money, digital payments, Bitcoin, cash.

Blog post by Dave Peck and the PSL team. Some issues they discuss: Very few categories of data belong on-chain … Today’s smart contract programming models are deeply flawed … Smart contracts can’t reference the “real-world”. They can only reference the blockchain itself. This is known as the “oracle problem” and it makes blockchains a necessarily closed system. This may sound like a trivial problem, but it is actually profound. For instance, it forces smart contract developers to jump...

BA seminar at the University of Bern. Uni Bern’s official course page: The seminar targets students who have completed their mandatory training in microeconomics, macroeconomics and mathematics (i.e., students in the second half of their BA studies) and who are interested in modern macroeconomic theory. We analyze arguments according to which the government does, or does not face an intertemporal budget constraint. What does the literature on asset pricing, rational bubbles, or the fiscal...