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The quiet engine of progress: Scholar networks before the Industrial Revolution | Mostly Economics
Marina Dimova and Arianne Wunder discuss scholar networks before the industrial revolution: Since the Middle Ages and throughout the early modern period, European universities and academies established dense webs of interpersonal connections among scholars. Using historical data on European scholars and their academic affiliations, this column argues that such networks were a key channel for…
The new curse of critical minerals: reversing of democracy | Mostly Economics
Rabah Arezki and Frederick van der Ploeg in this voxeu post point to this new curse for developing economies: A race is raging among global powers to secure access to critical minerals to power the simultaneous energy and digital transitions the world is experiencing. The extraordinary growth in demand for critical minerals is putting upward…
Private Law Frameworks for Tokenized Assets: Lessons from Switzerland, Germany, France, and the United States | Mostly Economics
Taiga Okuyama and Kazutoshi Sugimura discuss private law frameworks on tokenisation from four countries: In recent years, "asset tokenization" has attracted attention, with proof-of-concept experiments and actual transactions progressing worldwide. These initiatives can be understood as efforts to introduce new technologies to payment and settlement systems and extend their functionality in such a way that…
2025 economics Nobel: A Nobel for Innovation | Mostly Economics
Kevin Bryan on the economics nobel 2025: What a joy this morning, both personally and academically, to see a Nobel awarded for innovation. Joel Mokyr, an encyclopedia of economic history, was actually a PhD advisor of mine at Northwestern. Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt wrote one of the three canonical models of innovation and growth that every economist…
Two paths to prosperity: Europe vs China | Mostly Economics
Joel Mokyr co-wrote this article with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini just a few days before being awarded the Nobel prize: The starkly different paths of economic and institutional development followed by China and the West is often attributed largely to the Industrial Revolution. This column argues that institutions and culture played a key role…
Two Peas in A Pod: Democracy and Capitalism | Mostly Economics
Vincent Geloso and Alex Tabarrok argue democracy and capitalism go hand in hand: Many people argue that democracy is incompatible with capitalism but they differ on whether democracy will subvert capitalism or whether capitalism will subvert democracy. The first argue that the logic of democracy leads to socialism with James Madison and Joseph Schumpeter decrying…
Turning openness into strength: the moment of the euro | Mostly Economics
Christine Lagarde of ECB pitches for Euro as a global currency based on Europs's openness: “The dollar may be our currency, but it’s your problem.” When John Connally, President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, spoke these words in the 1970s, he was describing a world dominated by the dollar, where other countries had little choice but to…
Nobel Economics 2025: Smith and Schumpeter Award | Mostly Economics
My article in moneycontrol on Nobel Prize economics 2025. For the fourth successive year, the Nobel Committee has awarded the prize to economists who have delved into history to answer some of the big questions of our time. It’s the turn of path-breaking research into innovation and technological progress this year. Adam Smith and Joseph…
China’s Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust | Mostly Economics
Sebastian Horn, Carmen M. Reinhart & Christoph Trebesch reflect on the Chinese lending to developing countries: This paper provides a comprehensive overview of China’s lending to developing countries—a central feature of today’s international financial system. Building on our previous research and the work of others, we document the scale, destination, and terms of China’s overseas lending boom, as…
Nobel economics 2025: Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt | Mostly Economics
The Nobel economics 2025 has been awared to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025 to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth” with one half to…
Linking Equity (Justice) with Efficiency (Reason): Remembering John R Commons | Mostly Economics
Linking Equity (Justice) with Efficiency (Reason): Remembering John R Commons Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD Former (Economics) Professor, SRCC, DU Today (October 13) marks the 163rd birth anniversary of John R Commons (1862-1945). This piece is a homage to him as a working people’s economist. Workers are interested in equity as life is unfair to…
Emerging Market Resilience: Good Luck or Good Policies? | Mostly Economics
IMF's World Economic Outlook has a chapter on resilence in emerging markets: Emerging markets have shown remarkable resilience to risk-off shocks in recent years. While favorable external conditions—good luck—contributed to this resilience, improvements in policy frameworks—good policies—played a critical role in bolstering the capacity of emerging markets to withstand risk-off shocks. Improvements in monetary and…
María Corina Machado: Bitcoin is a lifeline for Venezuelans | Mostly Economics
Governments often criticise and ban bitcoin (crypto) saying it leads to money laundering and terrorist financing. Bitcoin supported argue the opposite saying Bitcoin actually helps people fight repressive and inflationary regimes. In this 2024 interview, Nobel Peace Prize awardee Maria Machado called bitcoin a lifeline: In an exclusive interview with Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer…
Nobel Peace Prize 2025: Maria Corina Machado for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela | Mostly Economics
Will he, won't he? Finally, the buzz around Nobel Pece Prize 2025 has ended with committee awarding to Maria Corina Machado, the leader of opposition party from Veneuzula. The Prize was not awarded to Donald Trump who pulled all his might trying to to force the COmmittee to award prize to be awarded to him.…
How wars have led to innovation in money and payments | Mostly Economics
Fascinating post by BankUnderground Blog: Digital currencies and stablecoins have increased interest in how new forms of money are adopted. Looking to three episodes from the 1690s to the First World War, this post considers how paper currency replaced coin in Britain, an historical example of adoption of new money. The underlying drivers were not…
Unlocking America’s Political Finance History: Campaign Data from 1912-1974 | Mostly Economics
INET has collaborated with US National Archives to provide data on financing US poiltical parties from 1912-74!: Narratives in American history, politics, and economics — even those by the most accomplished researchers — often resemble donuts: at their core lies a hole that no amount of sweet speculation can truly fill. They say almost nothing…
From Mundell Fleming approach to Integrated Policy Framework: Lessons from South Korea | Mostly Economics
In 2024, Gita Gopinath and Suman Basu of IMF had proposed a new framework for macro policy and named it Integrated Policy Framework: The Mundell-Fleming IS-LM approach has guided generations of economists over the past 60 years. But countries have experienced new problems, the international finance literature has advanced, and the composition of the global…
Book Review: The Book of Hope – A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams | Mostly Economics
Book Review: Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams. 2021. The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. Celadon Books. Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD Former (Economics) Professor, SRCC, DU Jane Goodall (1934-2025) peacefully exited this world on October 1, leaving behind an invaluable message for humanity through this book. There are many poems for…
Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator Rises | Mostly Economics
Move over Adam Smith's invisible hand. Time for some discussion on Adam Smith's impartial spectator. Daniel B. Klein, Nicholas R. Swanson, and Jeffrey T. Young in EconJournalWatch reflect on confusion around Smith's impartial spectator: Scholars are divided about how to interpret “impartial spectator” in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). Some Smith scholars have advanced the view that…
A Teacher Writes to Students Series (54): Monetary Economic Bunk | Mostly Economics
A Teacher Writes to Students Series (54): Monetary Economic Bunk Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD Department of Economics (Retd.), SRCC, DU Econ students are usually taken for a fantasy ride by neoclassical economic preaching (Keen, 2024). They are not allowed to board the real world bus of alternative, truthful economics. Consider, for example, how the…
How the US South caught up: A century of manufacturing productivity convergence | Mostly Economics
Alexander Klein, Miguel León-Ledesma and Nicholas Crafts in this voxeu article discuss how US South caught up with US North: Economic historians have long debated whether lagging regions can catch up in productivity with industrial leaders. This column shows that, under the right conditions, such catch-up can be remarkably rapid. Using newly digitised US Census…
Fractional Ownership and Copyright Licensing: Evidence from the Music Industry | Mostly Economics
Alberto Galasso & El Hadi Caoui in this new NBER paper look at music industry: Creative content is often the product of collaboration, which may lead to fractional ownership of intellectual property. We study the effect of fractional ownership on the licensing of copyrighted material and its reuse. To do so, we compile new data on the…
Permanent Capital Losses after Banking Crises | Mostly Economics
Matthew Baron, Luc Laeven, Julien Pénasse & Yevhenii Usenko in this NBER paper: We study the mechanisms driving bank losses across historical banking crises in 46 economies and the effectiveness of policy interventions in restoring bank capitalization. We find that bank stocks experience large, permanent declines at the onset of crises. These losses predict commensurate long-term declines in banks’…
Witch Hunts, Autocracy, and the Age of Algorithmic Empires | Mostly Economics
Asokakumar V writes in TheIndiaForum: As cyber empires tighten control, digital platforms spread unseen violence that colonises the mind. Yet counter-movements are emerging—decentralised tools restoring openness, autonomy, and resistance to censorship. Can people reclaim peace and freedom from the very digital cages that confine them. How these media empies which once stood for liberty and…
Tanzania’s ruling party has crushed the opposition – the elections are a mere formality | Mostly Economics
State of democracy is declining across the world. As per V-Dem, number of autocracies is higher than democracies for the first time in 20 years. The number of electoral autocracies has decreased from 64 in 2019 to 56 by 2024, it is no good news as closed autocracies has increased – from 22 to 35…
The product of the railways is the timetable | Mostly Economics
Benedict Springbett in this substack post: We could therefore say that the product of the railways (and roads, and airports) is travel. But we can be more specific than that. A railway is not like a road. A road is built, and then it is open for anybody to use it at any time. There is…
The Traffic Noise Externality: Costs, Incidence and Policy Implications | Mostly Economics
Enrico Moretti & Harrison Wheeler discuss traffic noise externality in this NBER paper: More than 42 million Americans are exposed to medium or high levels of traffic noise. Despite its potentially large toll and unequal distribution, the economic costs, incidence, and policy implications of traffic noise have received limited attention in economics. We quantify the aggregate…
Introduction of risk based premium framework for deposit insurance in India | Mostly Economics
RBI announced introduction of risk based premium in deposit insurance in its monetary policy today (1-Oct-25): Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation (DICGC), under the DICGC Act, 1961 has been operating the deposit insurance scheme since 1962 on a flat rate premium basis. At present, the banks are charged a premium of 12 paise per…
Türkiye’s Homemade Crises | Mostly Economics
A. Hakan Kara & Alp Simsek writes on Turkish crisis of 2020s in this NBER paper: Türkiye's response to post-pandemic inflation is a cautionary tale of how political pressure for low interest rates can create macroeconomic instabilities. While central banks worldwide raised interest rates to combat inflation in 2021-2023, Turkish authorities pursued the opposite strategy: cutting real…
Five megatrends shaping the rise of nonbank finance | Mostly Economics
Jay Surti on IMF blog explains 5 megatrends on rise of non-bank finance: Governments have new lenders, enhancing liquidity and holding down rates: New nonbank buyers for bonds such as US Treasuries provide additional liquidity. This helps markets operate efficiently, which can help hold down the interest on national debt that taxpayers ultimately pay. In…
Reserve Bank of New Zealand opens consultation on use of the term ‘bank’ | Mostly Economics
Reserve Bank of NZ has set up a consultation on usage of word bank: The Reserve Bank of New Zealand – Te Pūtea Matua has opened consultation on the use of the word ‘bank’ under the Deposit Takers Act 2023 (DTA). The consultation paper proposes expanding the use of the word ‘bank’ to all deposit…
Impact of UPI on Cash Demand – Evidence from National and Subnational Levels | Mostly Economics
In RBI's Sep-25 bulletin, Sakshi Awasthy and Subrat Kumar Seet analyse impact of UPI on cash demand : While the broader shift to digital payments is well-established, regional adoption of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and its impact on cash demand remain underexplored. This article examines the impact of UPI on cash demand at both…
Political polarization in Europe | Mostly Economics
Marina Diakonova, Corinna Ghirelli and Javier J. Pérez in this Bank of Spain paper: Political polarization—broadly defined as the growing ideological distance between political parties or their supporters—has become an increasingly prominent feature of both U.S. and European political discourse. While it is often associated with legislative dysfunction, existing measures tend to conflate polarization with…
Study finds male and female economists see the economy differently… | Mostly Economics
Mohsen Javdani has surveyed 2400 economists across 19 countries and finds that male and female econs see the economy differently: My recent research contributes to broader efforts to understand how gender shapes the intellectual terrain of economics. Drawing on an original international survey of more than 2,400 economists across 19 countries, it systematically examines gender differences in…
The world is following the China model | Mostly Economics
Sanjaya Baru writes about how the world is following the China model. He defines China model as countries curbung freedoms in name of development. He cites how the earlier models - Washington Consensus and Fukuyama Man- that advoated liberal democracy have been sidelined.
Soviet communism was not more successful at reducing inequality than other regimes | Mostly Economics
Joan Costa-i-Font, Anna Nicińska and Melcior Rossello Roig in this voxeu article: Inequality is a major concern for many economies, prompting the question of whether some regimes are more effective at reducing inequality than others. This column uses measures of welfare including health status and living space to show that, despite Soviet communism’s aim of…
Impact of Russian Ukraine war on book reading in Russia | Mostly Economics
Interesting research by Natalia Vasilenok of Stanford University (HT: MR Blog). It is her job market paper. In this paper, I measure the effect of conflict on the demand for frames of reference, or heuristics that help individuals explain their social and political environment by means of analogy. To do so, I examine how Russia’s…
GST 2.0: What about those who wrote about GST 1.0 flaws and were trolled mercilessly? | Mostly Economics
Indian media and businesses are celebrating GST 2.0 like there is no tomorrow. But then there have been so many articles arguing how GST 1.0 was always flawed. It was hardly "the good and simple tax" that was advocated by the government. There were too many tax rates and many essentials such as insurance attracted…
How Congress Designed the Federal Reserve to Be Independent of Presidential Control | Mostly Economics
Gary Richardson and David Wilcox in this Journal of Economic Perspectives article trace history of Federal Reserve independence: Conventional wisdom traces the origins of the Federal Reserve's independence to the 1951 Treasury-Fed Accord. That rendition of history is inaccurate. The principal source of the Fed's monetary-policy independence is the Banking Act of 1935, which created…
Profile of Guido Imbens, 2021 economics Nobel Laureate | Mostly Economics
IMF F&D magazine profiles Prof Guido Imbens of Stanford Univ who was awarded Nobel prize in economics in 2021. There have been a couple of times in Guido Imbens’ life when he has been seriously underestimated. Once, as a diligent schoolboy in The Netherlands, young Guido was unceremoniously banished for weeks from his first economics class after clashing…