Christopher Gandrud
(간드루드 크리스토파)

A post election update to my previous post : The Pirate Party did surprisingly well taking 8.9% of the vote and gaining 15 seats. Der Linke is no longer a contender to be part of the governing coalition. Basically everyone else remained the same from the previous election except the liberal FDP, who were basically wiped out. For full results see this Der Spiegel graphic:

For my political science readers out there, I've put together a short slide show of election poster photos I've taken recently (scroll down and click). These are for the upcoming Berlin state elections  (Battle for the Rotes Rathaus).  A few things I thought were interesting: The top poster in the first photo is for current SPD mayor Klaus Wowereit. Though the SPD is a social democratic party, in Berlin it is in coalition with Die Linke ("The Left" party created from pieces of the old East German Socialist Unity Party), and this is Berlin which votes pretty strongly for left parties, they only have a small blob of red on their poster. The major colour is blue? I asked a German coworker (and a researcher for an SPD MP) about this. She explained "they chose blue because they want to look cool". Oddly, the centre-right CDU (bottom picture 3 and 5) use read for their letters, but stick to blue otherwise. The second poster is for a Pirate Party cand...

I ran across this data on science publications by country from the World Bank . Some quick thoughts: It seems that the EU, contrary to popular wisdom, has maintained a slight lead over the US as the academic science publishing centre for a bit more than a decade. Of course the US (pop. ~ 307 million ) is still publishing above its population adjusted weight relative to the EU (pop. ~ 501 million ). However, assuming that universities are places where resources are transfered from teaching (i.e. students) to research and given the incredible rise in US student debt (see my previous post ) I would have expected to see a larger increase in US publications because presumably US universities would have more resources. Of course there are many different reasons that student debt can increase without an increase in university resources, but an essentially flat absolute number of publications over the entire period is kind of strange.  Finally, what countries are pro...

For anyone interested in central banking, you might find this photo amusing. I recently took it at the Bank of Korea Museum  (website includes virtual 3D tour for those not traveling to Seoul anytime soon). It shows the BoK's Monetary Policy Committee. I'm not sure how you would code this for a project on central bank transparency. Also, I'm not sure which of the puppets is supposed to be the Ministry of Strategy and Finance's " observer ". Final note: this reminded me of a perhaps an excruciating plan for an multi-holiday theme. Central bank museum tours. Then again, the museums are usually free, the Bank of England Museum is actually pretty interesting, and it can't be worse than touring all of the major league baseball stadiums .  

This graph from The Atlantic's Daniel Indiviglio is pretty astounding (click to enlarge). A good deal has already been written about it. Particularly the fact that the growth in student debt exceeded the growth in other debt during what is now know to have been a massive housing bubble. I don't want to double up on too much of what others have written, but I had some thoughts. The graph (and the article) (and current students) make a compelling case that we are in a student loan bubble. So, it might be sensible given the obviously high cost of the previous bubble to begin to at least draw down the growth in student debt. This likely means some combination of (a) reducing government support for student loans (removing guarantees, tightening lending standards, etc.), (b) providing grants to students, (c) instituting some sort of price controls on universities (tuition caps). All three of these measures are politically difficult: Reducing Loan Support: Much of the increa...

After some weeks of teaching a summer course at Peking University, I'm back at the blog. (For the curious, virtually all Google-hosted sites are blocked in China, including this one.) I had intended to start off the new series of posts with something on European bank guarantees, perhaps inspired by this FT editorial . However, before getting to that I just wanted to point your attention to Janet Reitman's Rolling Stone article on reconstruction, or the lack thereof in Haiti. (Coincidentally, this is the second Rolling Stone article this week suggested by longform.org that I've liked. The other was Matt Taibbi's piece on how the SEC disposes evidence from preliminary investigations. I would blog about that article too but I think I need to just sit down and write the "credibly committing to bad information" paper that I've already mentioned .) I actually don't have too much to add to the discussion, especially considering Felix Salmon's ni...

Recently the EU set up the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB). Ok, this is kind of old news (the enacting legislation went into effect in December 2010). Why am I writing about it now? Well, just the other day EU leaders put together another rescue package that included guarantees and lose-sharing with banks (a partial default). In all of the discussion surrounding the future shape of a sustainable system of EU government financing ( here or here for example) there has been little discussion of the need for good information about what is really going on. In research I'm currently putting together (and mentioned in previous posts ) I've found that in order for policymakers to actually choose the level of bank (and I suppose government debt) guarantees that they want they need good information about economic fundamentals (not a huge surprise). But there is a good chance that the ESRB won't be able to give good information. Or more precisely, any information they give wi...

Interesting BBC update to the previous post.

The NY Times website recently published a story about "The Rise of the Fake Apple Store" . Um, there are "fake" Apple Stores everywhere, including in the US. There is even a "fake" store up the street from my Dad's house in Erie, Pennsylvania. The real story isn't "Asians are Slavishly Copying American Creativity", but "Local Entrepreneurs Meet Demand for Apple Retail Experience when Apple Doesn't". Basically, even in places where Apple doesn't set up shop like Erie, PA, Kunming, and Seoul (which I know also has plenty of Apple Store-like stores) there is still a latent demand for well designed modern places to try and buy Apple products. Look-a-like stores are just filling this demand. Since (all the ones I've ever been to) sell actual Apple products what is the harm in this? However, the comments on both the NY Times site and at Slate (where it is largely reprinted) have largely picked up the "Slavish Asians...

In the previous post I pointed to some of the ways that financial regulators in Korea and the US have credibly committed to bad regulation by making themselves bad at collecting financial market information. But there were two unresolved issues I'll cover now: Why would regulators want weak regulation? How did Korea get out of this problem? Answer 1: Sure, there are lots of reasons why regulators would want to have weak regulation. There are the usual stories about crony capitalism , revolving doors , etc. Sure, there probably is something to these theories. But there is also something less sinister, but more problematic going on: loose regulation might be good for the general economy in the short-term . In fact, this is how US regulators have been talking about the issue (for example see this great article from the FT ). The basic argument is that enforcing tight capital adequacy requirements, lending standards, etc., makes less money and credit available to lend to busine...

It's always a good day when you notice your PhD research overlapping with what's going on in the news. PhD research might actually matter! This happened to me when I was listening to a recent Fresh Air interview with NY Times reporter Louise Story about why the United States has prosecuted so few people involved in the financial crisis. A couple points caught my attention: Regulatory agencies, especially the SEC, are understaffed. (not really news to most people interested in this stuff) Since 2008 the Justice Department has officially allowed financial companies to defer prosecutions if they conduct their own investigation into alleged wrongdoing. (that's more like it) The combined effect of understaffing and essentially outsourcing investigations to financial companies is that regulators are: Losing the capacity to do their own investigations of financial institutions Not going to even be able to critically evaluate the investigations...

This map shows the rapid growth in the number of countries with explicit deposit guarantee programs. When a government creates this type of program they have to choose who will govern it: the ministry of finance (i.e. direct government control), the central bank, or a specialised entity, like the United State's Deposit Insurance Corporation. Specialised deposit insurers may be indirectly accountable to some combination of the government, the central bank, or other actors. Generally, they are not accountable to only one, so we can think of them as having delegated powers. For more information see: Gandrud (2011) .

This visualisation shows when countries gave their securities supervisors English names similar to "Financial Services Authority" (FSA), "Securities & Exchange Commission" (SEC), or other. Countries can choose certain names for their supervisors to indicate to financial markets and other governments that they are following international norms and standards. We can see that between the 1980s and 2007 there are two trends. The first is to use a name similar to the United State's SEC. The second is based on the United Kingdom's FSA, which was created in 1997. These name changes are associated with evolving international standards and reforms in actual governance practices. For further details see Gandrud (2011) .