Tag Archives: Notes

India follows suggestions to fight tax evasion by taking high denomination notes out of circulation … and introducing new ones. Until the end of the year, Indians may exchange the old banknotes against new ones, at banks or post offices, by identifying themselves. On his blog, J P Koning discusses earlier demonetization episodes in Iraq and Sweden. India’s move does not exactly follow the well publicized suggestions currently debated. But it might work.

Food for All matches restaurants that miscalculated demand with hungry consumers.

On his blog, J P Koning discusses Kenneth Rogoff’s proposal to abolish high denomination notes (discussed earlier). Koning concludes: I agree with Rogoff’s general point that it makes sense to burden cash users with ever more work since this burden disproportionately falls on heavy users like criminals. But Rogoff hasn’t yet convinced me that the status quo policy of gradually increasing the workload involved in cash usage (via inflation) needs to be sped up by a sudden removal of every...

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.