Mostly Economics

Martina Jančoková, Enrico Mallucci, Martino Ricci and Luca Tondo on whether Euro worked as a safe-haven currency during these trying times. In earlier crises, Euro has not been seen as a safe-haven currency . However in 2025 and 2026, there are signs that Euro behaved like a safe-haven currency. Safe-haven currencies offer refuge to investors […]

HBS has put an exhibit at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library on Muriel Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat at the New York Stock Exchange Ana Elena Azpúrua reviews the exhibit: Muriel Siebert lacked the usual contacts or credentials valued on Wall Street. She liked to say that she arrived in New York […]

Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in this PIIE research show how China is limiting industrialisation in developing economies: Concern over China’s trade surplus is again resurging in the United States and Europe, but less attention has been paid to what China’s surplus means for low- and middle-income countries. Despite becoming a richer and higher-tech economy, China continues […]

Karin Östling Svensson of Riskbank notes that Sweden could face a housing surplus going forward: The population is growing more slowly than before – only 1.9 per cent is expected to be added by 2034, compared to 8.6 per cent in the last decade. Fewer births, more deaths and lower immigration contribute to this trend. […]

Friederike Niepmann, Leslie Sheng Shen, and Joshua Walker in this Fed research note: Geopolitical risk has emerged as a central driver of global financial markets, with episodes such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and recent conflicts in the Middle East triggering sharp movements in asset prices and increases in market volatility. But not all industries […]

Merlyn Paul and Maggie Paul write on the organ donation system In TheIndiaForum: On 10 February 2026, Dr Thankam Subramonian, a consultant in foetal medicine and obstetrics and gynaecology at Manipal Hospital, Bengaluru, became the first anonymous kidney donor in Karnataka. Despite the dominant organ donation legislation in the country—the Transplantation of Human Organs and […]

Luc Laeven, Alexander Popov and Catalina Cozariuc analyse rise of China in academic research in this ECB reseach paper: Analyzing more than 300,000 articles across 40 top-tier journals between 2000 and 2022, this study demonstrates that China’s 2006 National Medium-and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology catalyzed a surge in publication volume […]

Gale Pooley writes on the how Gillette shaped the shaving razor market: One morning in Boston in 1895, as K. C. Gillette stood before the mirror, a brilliant idea flashed across his mind. “As I stood there with the razor in my hand, my eyes resting on it as lightly as a bird settling down on […]

To Be or Not to Be in Oikonomia Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD Former Economics Professor, SRCC, DU Having worked in SRCC for about 35 years, if I were to interpret those years as times during which  progress did not always imply evolution like in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, I  would be considered an unpatriotic […]

Mariusz Lukasiewicz of Leipzig University has this interesting paper on the history of Nairobi Stock Exchange from the period 1954 to 1970. This article investigates the genesis, organisation and operations of the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) in the period 1954–1970. Using the NSE’s institutional and organisational evolution as an analytical lens into the early history […]

Mark Egan, Ali Hortaçsu, Nathan Kaplan, Adi Sunderam and Vincent Yao in this HBS Working paper write about banks need for sleepy customers. We examine the implications of sleepy deposits and their impact on competition, bank value, and financial stability in the US banking sector. We first document the shopping behavior of depositors using novel […]

Paul R. Gregory in this 2024 article on how Putin’s methods are similar to those deployed by Stalin: Vladimir Putin has created a vast climate of fear that extends beyond Russia and the Russian diaspora. As such, it effectively muzzles anti-Putin sentiment around the world. How this climate of fear works, and its differences from […]

Sam Hempel, JP Perez-Sangimino, and Jessie Jiaxu Wang in this Fed article: The expansion of stablecoins has moved digital payment tokens from the periphery of financial markets to the center of policy discussions. With a global market capitalization in the mid-hundreds of billions of dollars and annual settlement volumes in the trillions as of 2025, […]

Tyler Cowen on Jevons: In the 1860s Jevons built a Logical Abacus, sometimes called a logical piano, a kind of early computer that could perform (some kinds of) logical operations faster than humans could. It is held in the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, and you can think of its structure […]

RBI DG Poonam Gupta reviews India’s inflation targeting framework: It is a pleasure for me to be here at NCAER to speak on India’s current monetary policy framework. My remarks focus on how the existing framework has evolved over the past decade, where it stands today, and the issues that may shape its next iteration […]

Divide and rule has been a tried and tested strategy for empires and modern politics.  In order to rule for a long time, it is really important to keep the propaganda on us versus them for as long as possible. Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter and Guido Tabellini research on how politicians and compliant media polarise […]

Harris Dellas and George S. Tavlas in the Journal of Economic Perspectives discuss history of ideas in great dollar shortage debate: The dollar shortage debate—Paul Samuelson called it “the big open question of our time”—dominated international macroeconomics in the 15 years following the end of World War II. There were two main views regarding its […]

Authoritarian leaders dislike statistical systems. One of the first institutions/people they fire is statisticians. Trump did the same. Nicholas Bloom, Erica L. Groshen, Duncan Hobbs & Michael R. Strain on importance of a reliable and robust statistical system: On August 1, 2025, President Trump fired the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and claimed that the […]

Prof Paul Ginsberg of University of Southern California in the recent Journal of Economic Perspectives:   This essay, commissioned to serve as an introduction to the JEP symposium on current competition in health care, provides a historical perspective on the role of both competition and regulation in the financing and delivery of health services since the implementation of […]

A Teacher Writes to Students Series (68): Cooperative Individualism Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD Former Professor, Department of Economics, SRCC, DU   The Coffee-Klatch-with-Robert-Reich videos can spook you out of your stupor as regards what do we do now with Trumpist academics and think tank politics. Likewise, if you dig up the history of economic […]