Tag Archives: Notes

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

Daniel Shiffman’s book The Nature of Code (posted online) provides a nice introduction to concepts such as particle systems, cellular automata, fractals, or neural networks and shows how to code them using Processing.

In the FT, Eric Platt offers an update on the debt situation in Puerto Rico: The U.S. territory carries a USD 70 billion debt burden. It has defaulted multiple times over the past year, “including on bonds backed with a constitutional guarantee.” It did not have access to a court-backed restructuring process until Congress recently passed and President Obama signed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (Promesa). A seven-person control board controls the...

15 years ago, Swissair stopped operating. Many of the fleet’s airplanes were grounded at Zurich airport. Staff and passengers could not understand the world, official Switzerland was in a state of shock, and public perceptions of UBS management which was considered to have acted in treacherous ways, started their long descend. The movie: Grounding. Werner Enz looks back in the NZZ.