Learning

When the richest 85 people hold the combined wealth of 3.5 Billion poor people, economist Jose Antonio Ocampo explains that Income inequality can shift from a human rights issue to a marker of potentially dangerous economic instability.

Income Inequality can lead to Economic Instability

من بين خمسة ملايين نسمة من الفارين من الحرب الأهلية في سوريا، هناك أكثر من مليون لاجئ انتهى بهم المقام في الأردن. وقد أثرت أزمة اللاجئين بشدة على البلدان المضيفة مثل الأردن. وقد شارك معالي وزير التخطيط الأردني، السيد عماد فاخوري، في ندوة حول الصراعات وأزمة اللاجئين، على هامش اجتماعات الربيع المشتركة بين الصندوق والبنك الدولي. وفي هذا البث الصوتي يحدثنا معالي الوزير فاخوري عن آثار أزمة اللاجئين على الأردن.

عماد فاخوري، أزمة اللاجئين تؤثر سلبا على الأردن

Speaker(s): Professor Richard H Thaler | Richard Thaler, described by The Spectator as ‘the godfather of behavioural economics’, will be in conversation with LSE Director Craig Calhoun about his book Misbehaving, an authoritative and entertaining history of behavioural economics. Richard Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying an alarm clock, selling football tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments. Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behaviour, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world, revealing how behavioural economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything. Laced with antic stories of Thaler’s spirited battles with the bastions of traditional economic thinking, Misbehaving is a singular look into profound human foibles. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining. Richard H. Thaler (@R_Thaler) is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioural Science and Economics and the director of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is co-the author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness and has worked in the US with Barack Obama and with David Cameron's 'Nudge Unit' in the UK. Craig Calhoun (@craigjcalhoun) is Director and President of LSE. He is a world-renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology to culture, communication, politics, philosophy and economics. The Behavioural Research Lab (@LSEBehavioural) is a purpose-built facility set up by the Department of Management (@LSEManagement) for the use of researchers examining organisational behaviour and decision making. The BRL’s state-of-the-art facilities include 20 workstations for individual computer-mediated studies and four bespoke discussion rooms with built-in audio-visual equipment for studies in social dynamics. Since its opening in 2011, over 18000 participants have taken part in more than 120 studies.  The BRL caters to researchers across LSE, including Management, Economics, Geography/Grantham Institute, Philosophy, Social Policy, Social Psychology and Government, and offers a large diverse participant pool to its researchers.

Misbehaving: the making of behavioural economics [Audio]

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Soumith Chintala, AI research engineer at Facebook. Among his many research projects, Chintala was part of the team behind DCGAN (Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks), a widely cited paper that introduced a set of neural network architectures for unsupervised learning. Our conversation centered around PyTorch, the successor to the popular Torch scientific computing framework. PyTorch is a relatively new deep learning framework that is fast becoming popular among researchers. Like Chainer, PyTorch supports dynamic computation graphs, a feature that makes it attractive to researchers and engineers who work with text and time-series.

Why AI and Machine Learning Researchers are Beginning to Embrace PyTorch

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO of Confluent. As I noted in a recent post on “The Age of Machine Learning,” data integration and data enrichment are non-trivial and ongoing challenges for most companies. Getting data ready for analytics—including machine learning—remains an area of focus for most companies. It turns out, “data lakes” have become staging grounds for data; more refinement usually needs to be done before data is ready for analytics. By making it easier to create and productionize data refinement pipelines on both batch and streaming data sources, analysts and data scientists can focus on analytics that can unlock value from data.

The Current State of Apache Kafka

If literature, as romantic poet John Keats said, is for soul making, how will our souls be made and remade in a digital age when most reading, if it happens at all, occurs on screens and at light speed? What are the threats to knowledge acquisition, modes of teaching, learning and wisdom?

This Sydney Ideas panel discussion took place on 15 October 2018: https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/sydney-ideas/2018/reading-and-writing-slowly-in-a-digital-age.html

Reading and writing slowly in a digital age

Technological innovation like automation using robots to produce goods and provide services creates tremendous opportunities for businesses. But as the cost of producing robots goes down, is this technology widening the income gap? Economist Arnaud Costinot has been studying technological change and its impact on inequality, and in this podcast, he discusses how a robot tax might help better distribute the benefits of artificial intelligence, or AI technologies. Arnaud Costinot is a Professor of Economics at MIT, and coauthor of Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation. Costinot was invited to present his research at the IMF.

Arnaud Costinot: Taxing Robots to Level the Playing Field

The implications of crypto-assets, emerging payment technologies and Facebook’s plans to create a global digital currency, Libra – discussed by our host, Michael Steen, and guests, Dirk Bullmann, Maria Teresa Chimienti, and ECB Executive Board member Benoît Cœuré. 

Recorded on 6 and 9 September 2019.


In this episode:

(01:03) Benoît Cœuré 
The big picture: what is money, why is there a demand for digital currencies and what is the role of central banks in this field?

(11:47) Maria Teresa Chimienti
Getting technical: what are crypto-assets, what makes Facebook’s Libra different, and why is it important for central banks to research these phenomena?
  
(17:32) Dirk Bullmann
Talking innovation: what is blockchain and DLT, why are they so fascinating and how does innovation at the ECB help make payments instant?


Further reading:

Explainer: What is money?
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/explainers/tell-me-more/html/what_is_money.en.html

Explainer: What is bitcoin?
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/explainers/tell-me/html/what-is-bitcoin.en.html

Explainer: How could new technology transform financial markets?
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/explainers/tell-me-more/html/distributed_ledger_technology.en.html

Research – special feature: Distributed Ledger Technology (e.g. blockchain)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/annual/special-features/2016/html/index.en.html

Research – Occasional Paper:  Crypto-Assets: Implications for financial stability, monetary policy, and payments and market infrastructures
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpops/ecb.op223~3ce14e986c.en.pdf

Research – Economic Bulletin Article:  Understanding the crypto-asset phenomenon, its risks and measurement issues
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-bulletin/articles/2019/html/ecb.ebart201905_03~c83aeaa44c.en.html

European Central Bank website
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/

The views expressed are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of the European Central Bank.

Innovation in payments: Libra, blockchain and crypto-assets

How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting the economy? Which sectors have been hit hardest? What is the ECB doing to limit the economic impact of the crisis? Our host Michael Steen discusses these questions with ECB Chief Economist Philip R. Lane.
The views expressed are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of the European Central Bank.  
Published on 18 May 2020; recorded on 11 May 2020.

In this episode:

(02:30) Coronavirus and the economy
The economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the characteristics of the shock on the supply and demand sides and which sectors have been hit the hardest by the crisis.

(08:11) Coronavirus and the policy response
The need to address the dramatic downturn in the economy that is threatening price stability, how we are supporting households and firms and why fiscal policy has to play a central role.

(15:18) The risk of falling prices and targeted lending
How the pandemic pushes prices down in the short and medium-term and how our targeted measures incentivise banks to continue lending to small and medium-sized businesses and households in these uncertain times.

The ECB’s response to the coronavirus pandemic
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/home/search/coronavirus/html/index.en.html
https://www.bankingsupervision.europa.eu/home/search/coronavirus/html/index.en.html

Philip R. Lane: Interview with the Telegraaf
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/inter/date/2020/html/ecb.in200512~13fcf73079.en.html

Philip R. Lane: The monetary policy response to the pandemic emergency
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2020/html/ecb.blog200501~a2d8f514a0.en.html

ECB announces new pandemic emergency longer-term refinancing operations
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2020/html/ecb.pr200430_1~477f400e39.en.html

ECB recalibrates targeted lending operations to further support real economy
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2020/html/ecb.pr200430~fa46f38486.en.html

Luis de Guindos, Isabel Schnabel: Improving funding conditions for the real economy during the COVID-19 crisis: the ECB’s collateral easing measures
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2020/html/ecb.blog200422~244d933f86.en.html

Fabio Panetta: Why we all need a joint European fiscal response
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/inter/date/2020/html/ecb.in200421~a7f2ec5159.en.html

Christine Lagarde: How the ECB is helping firms and households
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2020/html/ecb.blog200409~3aa2815720.en.html

Luis de Guindos, Isabel Schnabel: The ECB’s commercial paper purchases: A targeted response to the economic disturbances caused by COVID-19
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2020/html/ecb.blog200403~54ecc5988b.en.html

Christine Lagarde: Our response to the coronavirus emergency
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2020/html/ecb.blog200319~11f421e25e.en.html

ECB announces €750 billion Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2020/html/ecb.pr200318_1~3949d6f266.en.html

ECB statement
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2020/html/ecb.pr200318~152e1c740f.en.html

Philip R. Lane: The Monetary Policy Package: An Analytical Framework
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2020/html/ecb.blog200313~9e783ea567.en.html

ECB announces easing of conditions for targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTRO III)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2020/html/ecb.pr200312_1~39db50b717.en.html

ECB announces measures to support bank liquidity conditions and money market activity
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2020/html/ecb.pr200312_2~06c32dabd1.en.html

European Central Bank website
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/

Coronavirus: from health crisis to economic crisis

Despite outnumbering men as college graduates within OECD countries, women are still underrepresented at the very top managerial levels, particularly in finance and business.  

In this podcast a group of women veterans of Wall Street describe how they got to Wall Street, what they found there, and offer advice to young women who want to get there.

Read the associated article from Finance & Development magazine:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2013/06/fang.htm


Women's Tales from Wall Street

Listen to IMF economists and other experts discuss key economic and financial issues of the day.

Arnaud Costinot: Taxing Robots to Level the Playing Field

IMF Podcasts

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