Category: Blog

I read this new paper titled “Climate Minsky moments and endogenous financial crises” by the Bundesbank’s Kaldorf & Rottner suggests that indeed, a rapid green transition may be a source of instability in the financial system. But long-term, climate policy might make finance more stable. In this note I ask what happens if the model…

I provided some comments on the end to de-minimis shipments to the US amidst recent announcements by Temu and Shein that would suggest notable price rises for US consumers due to the ongoing trade dispute between China and the US. I was quoted in this Newsweek piece. In my broader comments I added a few…

I am aware that I have shared some reflections on the tension between fiscal- and monetary over the past few years, usually in our Friday’s Beers and Plots series. At this series I share some reflections and we discuss the broader global and local developments in a group of academics, economists and policy folks. One…

Trump is putting China in an impossible situation. I fear that Chinese pride, due Trumps particular choice of rhetoric, will  be making it very difficult for China to navigate the situation in a face saving way. Why am I worried? Well, I think pride did get in the way before. Looking back at the pandemic.…

As I posted elsewhere (here and here) and before: Reducing the investibility of the US diminishes financial inflows domestically. Meanwhile, massive debt issuance in the EU—targeted at funding external security, climate action, and infrastructure—is building more liquid debt markets. Declining commodity prices could further lead to more debt issuance in other emerging market economies. This…

We are super happy to announce that the project on Political Expression of Academics on Social Media has been accepted for publication at Nature Human Behavior — you can read a bit about the project on academicexpression.online. As part of this publication process we were asked to write a bit about the background of this…

Written evidence submitted by Professor Thiemo Fetzer (UAIG0006) Response by Professor Thiemo Fetzer, Professor of Economics, University of Warwick and University of Bonn. Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and a Fellow at the National Institute for Social and Economic Research (NIESR) and Scientific Advisor to the Applied Economics AI group. Professor Thiemo Fetzer has extensive…

Data sellers can maximize profits by tailoring supplemental signals to buyers with private information. Using a real-world example of a local bakery optimizing ad spend through platforms like Google and Facebook, it becomes clear that tech giants such as these hold vast troves of data, acting as monopolists due to the depth and breadth of…

The work on causal claims in economics has taken off and there is quite a lot of interest in the methodology used across many different fields. I keep on saying, technology will humble us all and there may well have to be a fundamental debate about the social contract and the organisation of society. I…

It is the start of a new year and I expect 2025, unfortunately, to bring even more ruptures or surprises than 2024 did. The acceleration is in full swing and I frankly do think that some constraints that need relieving are being relieved. Yet, I want to offer some reflections on the state of AI…

This is a repost of an older version of a blog post. This was originally posted in 2016. For my paper Social Insurance and Conflict : Evidence from India, I was using the SENNA Natural Language processing toolkit to automatically generate a conflict dataset at the district level, based on raw newspaper clippings collected from the SATP (South…

This is a repost of a blog post from 2019 that was published also at the LSE and republished at Warwick Uni. I become increasingly sceptical of much of UK polling. There appears to be a very strange disconnect. Eurobarometer polling suggests that attitudes to the EU, if anything, appear to have become more pro-European…

In the complex landscape of the digital economy, the interplay between data sellers and buyers shapes the contours of modern commerce. Xueying Zhao’s job market paper (JMP) sheds light on a crucial aspect of this ecosystem: how data sellers can maximize profits by tailoring supplemental signals to buyers with private information. Here, I try to…

Below is the powerpoint of a keynote I gave (but interrupted after 1h due to feeling unwell) at the Shared Perspectives event at University of Bologna, October 6, 2023. Political-Economy-of-Climate-InactionDownload

The invasion of Ukraine is now in its second year. The war has raised a ton of issues and has made transparent many of the institutional failings that are due to relatively slow and modest technology adoption. The shocks have just been hitting incredibly hard and very frequent. The pandemic highlighted the many structural deficiencies…

This is another meta reflection that I want to share. This is relating the the Horizon IT system or the Post Office scandal. I must admit I have not followed all the details here but what strikes me as surprising is the timing that this scandal is being brought to light. Well, not quite brought…

One meta reflection on the Piketty, Saez, Zucman and Auten & Splinter debate is the following. It suggests there is an attempt to reset, control or cast doubt on a narrative. On one side you have academics at a top US University, on the other hand, you have academic economists associated with the public sector.…

Information governance and barriers to the free flow of information and data has been a or the key barrier to climate action. But with the rise of the information and attention economy, politically slanted information has both become the prime source of rents, while at the same time, has morphed into a potential weapon that…