Tag Archives: Information

List of third parties (other than PayPal customers) with whom personal information may be shared, according to Paypal, October 2019.

In an interview with The Independent, Jean Tirole discusses monopolies, regulation, the role of the state, the “Nobel syndrome,” and much more.

In its July 2017 Monetary Policy Report, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System discusses monetary policy rules. On pp. 36–38, the Board argues that [t]he small number of variables involved in policy rules makes them easy to use. However, the U.S. economy is highly complex, and these rules, by their very nature, do not capture that complexity. … Another issue related to the implementation of rules involves the measurement of the variables that drive the prescriptions...

Link to slides of a presentation at the Peterson Institute. According to Baldwin, the new globalization (since 1990) reflects the fact that ICT enabled G7 firms to precisely control what goes on inside developing-nation factories.

More and more researchers adopt the programming language Julia.

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...

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...

The blockchain technology opens up new possibilities for financial market participants. It allows to get rid of middle men and thus, to save cost, speed up clearing and settlement (possibly lowering capital requirements), protect privacy, avoid operational risks and improve the bargaining position of customers. Internet based technologies have rendered it cheap to collect information and to network. This lies at the foundation of business models in the “sharing economy.” It also lets...