Tag Archives: Notes

In a Bank of England Financial Stability Paper, Olga Cielinska, Andreas Joseph, Ujwal Shreyas, John Tanner and Michalis Vasios analyze transactions on the Swiss Franc foreign exchange over-the-counter derivatives market around January 15, 2015, the day when the Swiss National Bank de-pegged the Swiss Franc. From the abstract: The removal of the floor led to extreme price moves in the forwards market, similar to those observed in the spot market, while trading in the Swiss franc options...

The World Wealth and Income Database.

In the Tagesanzeiger, Felix Schaad offers a caricature with the title: “Donald Trump rejects the notion that he could be blackmailed.”

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experiment could have suffered from fewer frictions if bank notes had been overstamped rather than immediately withdrawn.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.