Blockchain Papers

RAKSHIT MADAN BAGDE

No abstract is available for this record.

Fernando Álvarez, David Argente, Diana Van Patten

A currency's essential feature is to be a medium of exchange. We leverage a quasi-natural experiment-El Salvador as the rst country to make bitcoin legal tender-to study a cryptocurrency's potential to be used in daily transactions. The government also launched and provided incentives to download and use a digital wallet named Chivo, which shares features with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and allows users to trade bitcoin and dollars. Were Chivo Wallet and bitcoin actually adopted after this "big push"? Conducting a representative face-to-face survey and relying on blockchain data to obtain all Chivo transactions, we document how usage of digital payments and bitcoin is low, concentrated, and has been decreasing over time. We nd that privacy concerns are key barriers to adoption, which speaks to a policy debate on crypto and CBDCs that has had anonymity at its core. We also estimate the technology's adoption cost and its network externalities.

Ashwath Komath

John Maynard Keynes proposed the concept of ‘Bancor’ in 1940 as a supranational currency that would serve as the international reserve currency. The concept did not take off at the time, despite the underlying need to liberate the international system from the hegemonic tendencies of a national currency serving as a global medium of exchange. The emergence of Bitcoin makes it possible to revive the idea of a de-nationalised global medium of exchange. This article examines the feasibility of such an idea by examining a viable state policy for adoption and use in the international realm.

Juan Varaco

Latin America is undergoing a profound reorganization. Though the worst years of the recession seem tobe behind us, the future remains fraught with uncertainty. Latin American nations will need to adapt tooperating in an increasingly deregulated and open economy governed by market sovereignty in thecoming years. Commitment to market forces, on the other hand, should not entail the State ceasing tointervene in the economy, but rather redefining the scope and intensity of its engagement. Futurepublic policies should shift away from managing a basic reality defined by governmental laws andcontrols and toward managing a more complex environment defined by numerous actors, private andpublic, operating under competitive norms and interacting with one another. Within this broadercontext, decentralization processes emerge as a primary forum for state transformation. This articlediscusses the primary qualities that must be retained by an economic adjustment plan aimed atachieving compatible fundamental macroeconomic balances and ensuring democracy's survival. Second,the study argues for seeing the present trend toward decentralization not only as a political byproductof democratic consolidation, but as a crucial component of a broader strategy of positive adjustment.

Simon Butler

Money has been a polarising and unresolved socio-economic issue for more than 300 years. In this article, we explore how the state became increasingly involved in money and, through the words of prominent monetary theorists, identify the problem of the state in money. We analyse Bitcoin to see if it is a solution to this problem but move on to contend that the political dimension needs to be the focus of theory in the 21st century and that control of the supply of money, and the power that it gives, is the root of contention.

Matthew Sparkes

No abstract is available for this record.

Eileen Boris

This extensively researched and sophisticated study breaks through conventional origin stories of neoliberalism. Before the Washington Consensus of the late 1980s and 1990s, which laid out the terms through which poor countries might receive international relief, there was Colombia's Cauca Valley Corporation and its adviser, David Lilienthal, the New Dealer turned businessman, who championed democracy through decentralization of investment and state authority. Before the Chicago Boys, a group of University of Chicago free-market economists, flocked to Pinochet's Chile as advisers in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a generation of Latin American economists trained in the United States, and there was Lauchlin Currie, the Keynesian internationalist fleeing McCarthyism who joined Colombia's National Planning Council and sought to differentiate the field of economics from that of management. As a regional study, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy undermines both triumphalist accounts and left critiques of privatization to complicate circuits of influence within the Americas. It joins intellectual history to political economy to emphasize that features of neoliberalism, like deregulation, austerity, and decentralization, were present in the mixture of public funding and private profits that characterized midcentury “free enterprise.”But it isn't just that ideas matter. So do memory, genealogies, and stories told—as witnessed by the protagonists of this history and the historian herself. In generating a new narrative by casting a wider geographical lens, Amy Offner punctures the self-congratulatory analysis of the architects of a new world order—a cast of characters including Colombian elites no less than old New Dealers, business school professors, foundations, international organizations, and corporate leaders. Notably, she deflates the self-serving claims of Lilienthal and Eduardo Wiesner, the Colombian economist whose reinterpretation of the midcentury mixed economy sought structural adjustment and public sector reorganization in order “to make collective action futile or impossible,” just like his North American counterparts (174).From the 1950s, state delegation of economic growth to private entities, run by businessmen, shaped the welfare, no less than the developmental, state. These actions forecasted later hollowing out of public services through for-profit prisons, schools, and social assistance. Offner deploys the term developmental state to underscore the role of industrial policy and state-supported macroeconomic intervention through autonomous regulatory and regional agencies. She convincingly shows how “social entrepreneurs,” like David Rockefeller and the Council for Latin America but also progressive self-help housing advocates, burrowed into the Great Society. They transferred lessons learned in places like the Cauca Valley to the continental US. The cost-plus system of defense contracting became a feature of job training and educational testing. In contrast to New Deal funding of public housing on the mainland, home ownership financing—previously applied to Puerto Rico—emerged in sweat equity projects under the War on Poverty. Indeed, experiments in colonized regions, including Native peoples’ reservations, provided the template for manpower projects. More successfully than in the United States, Indigenous and Afro-Colombians would come to embrace the logics of development to claim “economic resources and political autonomy as inalienable rights of ethnicity” (265).This is regional history at its best. Offner shows a command of the institutions, politics, landscapes, and social structure of Colombia, no less than the US. Through research in local as well as national sources, she moves outward from decentralization in Cauca Valley, an alluvial region far from Bogotá, where the wealthy sought protection from the poor and eventually displaced campesinos through minimal labor reform in the name of productivity and efficiency. Businessmen sought to turn holders of minifundistas into wage laborers as a solution to poverty that would maintain the class structure, even as they also contained the protests of ranchers from developmental encroachment. Gaining the power of taxation for hydroelectricity, other infrastructure, and soil reclamation, networked families won targeted legislation as well as funding from a dizzyingly array of international entities, including the World Bank, Rockefeller, and US foreign aid programs. Against continued political violence, amid Cold War anti-communism, Cauca Valley elites grabbed power where they could and, in the process, made the autonomous regional authority a state-building engine for private riches.In Colombia, social welfare policy “operated within the logic of austerity” that easily functioned amid “financial retrenchment” (91). Housing serves as a case study. Offner underscores the contradictions of whether or not to bolster private possession or expand public resources. With the laying out of Ciudad Kennedy project, planners brought the dream of the single-family, owner-occupied home to those with connections and steady incomes, leaving the poor behind. Its location encouraged sprawl, generating counter plans for urban gentrification. In a book that focuses on elites, interviews with early residents of such housing stands out as a social history gem that illuminates the gap between visions and practice. As Offner notes, “Residents . . . communicated a naturalized sense of the private home as a source of income and autonomy, a site of labor and leisure, a link between formal and informal sectors, a foundation of political citizenship and class belonging, and a place where nonnuclear households could deliver security for parents and children” (100). Such an insight aside, there is little analysis of social reproduction as a component of the mixed economy or the ways that privatization embedded gendered as well as racialized and class structures necessary for the reconstitution as well as maintenance of the resulting order.This focus on production derives from Offner's centering of the emergence of economics and management as two vying forms of knowledge whose adherents did so much to shape resulting programs. Nonetheless, by the late 1960s, economics and business consulting had become “indistinguishable” (142). Part II offers a fascinating analysis of another form of development: the creation and staffing of private and public universities. Economics and then business emerged as fields that conflated “broader business interests with the public interest,” conferring intellectual legitimacy (127). Business elites there and in the US anticipated the way the Koch brothers built research centers within universities, underscoring the book's general disruption of timelines and influencers. At the end, however, Offner refuses her own grim assessments, pointing to futurists like Arturo Escobar, who find in the present the seeds for moving beyond the marketization and privatization whose origins this innovative history so ably contests.

BCS Financial Services Specialist Group

Abstract The BCS Financial Services Specialist Group compresses over 2,000 years of history and explains how we moved from using gold coins to being on the brink of governments issuing their own central bank digital currencies.

Tai‐Wei Hu

No abstract is available for this record.

RAONI DO NASCIMENTO GONZAGA

O conceito de moedas descentralizadas vem sendo amplamente dissemi-

Alexander Lipton

New technologies unleash competitive threats to the incumbents by allowing new entrants to join the party and eventually reshape the entire financial ecosystem

Arūnas Lapinskas, Arūnas Lapinskas

The article discusses the main technological and economic aspects of the functioning of cryptocurrencies. Based on the analysis of monetary theories and the evolution of forms of money, it is shown that the technologies of mining and circulation of cryptocurrencies fully meet the requirements for "monetary material" and the trend in the development of monetary systems. It is concluded that the development of the form of money under the influence of scientific and technological progress has not changed their economic essence. The pros and cons of cryptocurrencies are shown. The problem of the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies is analyzed taking into account the new federal legislation.

Matheus Trotta Vianna

Bitcoin got increasing popularity and was considered by the public as a great investment due to huge overvaluation in 2017. In parallel, economists and high-level technicians started to advocate the use of bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies as an alternative to national currencies. However, bitcoin is far from being considered as money, so it is hard for a monetary and payment system to emerge based on these technologies. This paper, apart from briefly presenting the Bitcoin System, shows why bitcoin is not money in the light of the Keynesian theory. We use Keynesian essential properties of Money and Modern Money Theory to define money, and to show that cryptographic currencies are not money. We then go back to Keynes' theory of portfolio choice, established in Chapter 17 of the General Theory, to show what bitcoin really is: at most, bitcoin is a perfect virtual commodity, a virtual liquid speculative asset.

Lucas Manfredi

Wall Street's week ahead includes Costco earnings, more Bitcoin volatility and a fresh read on US GDP.

Genisson dos Santos Pinheiro, Alvani Bomfim de Sousa Júnior, Josivan dos Santos Moura

Este artigo tem o propósito de compreender questões pertinentes a respeito do contexto econômico da Criptomoeda Bitcoin, tanto no cenário mundial quanto no cenário nacional. Levando em consideração dados históricos e projeções futuras, fazendo também, uma análise fundamentalista dos princípios de tal Criptomoeda. O estudo em questão busca mostrar uma nova forma de investimento para pessoas que buscam potencializar seus rendimentos financeiros através de renda variável, ou seja, de um investimento que aproveita a volatilidade do mercado para adquirir rentabilização. Além do exposto, este estudo também aborda os conceitos voltados a compreensão do Bitcoin e das Criptomoedas, trazendo uma relação com a economia tradicional e desvendando qual é o público-alvo desse novo mercado, além de assimilar os principais motivos pelos quais esse público faz essas aplicações. A metodologia utilizada no desenvolvimento deste trabalho foi a partir da pesquisa bibliográfica e web bibliográfica.

Warren E. Weber

This paper imagines a world in which countries are on the Bitcoin standard, a monetary system in which all media of exchange are Bitcoin or are backed by it. The paper explores the similarities and differences between the Bitcoin standard and the gold standard and describes the media of exchange that would exist under the Bitcoin standard. Because the Bitcoin standard would closely resemble the gold standard, the paper explores the lessons about how it would perform by examining the classical gold standard period, specifically 1880–1913. The paper argues that because there would be virtually no arbitrage costs for international transactions, countries could not follow independent interest rate policies under the Bitcoin standard. However, central banks would still have some limited ability to act as lenders of last resort. Based on the experience during the classical gold standard period, the paper conjectures that there would be mild deflation and constant exchange rates under the Bitcoin standard. The paper also conjectures how long the Bitcoin standard might last if it were to come into existence.

Giovanni Dosi, Joseph E. Stiglitz

The Editorial Board of Industrial and Corporate Change is pleased to announce its newest venture as part of ICC’s ongoing commitment to highlighting important issues in management, economics, and business. With this Special Issue ICC launches an annual Special Issue devoted to the theme of Macro Economics and Development. As important economists early recognized, the crisis of 2008 fully exposed the inability of macroeconomic theory to account for the possibility of macroeconomic crises as well as deep and long-lasting downturns. This theoretical crisis rests at the very foundations of mainstream economics with its strict commitment to the equilibrium and far-sighted “rationality” of a fictitious representative agent. Unfortunately, a good deal of the intellectual efforts of macroeconomists since the crisis has gone into adding “epicycles” to an already baroque Ptolemaic construction, namely DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium modeling), by means of a new wave of frictions and rigidities and, in few cases, homeopathic doses of heterogeneity and bounded rationality. In the view of the Editors of this ICC Special Issue such patchwork is far from sufficient. We need a radical departure with radically different foundations. And we need some prestigious venues, where likeminded scholars, especially younger ones, can publish and debate without the tyranny of the “top five” journals, whose conservatism prevents new ideas and approaches from blossoming.1 This overriding purpose drives the launching of this first annual ICC Special Issue.It is proposed by a group of scholars who strongly agree on some propositions (and do not disagree too much on a few others).2 A non-exhaustive list of such propositions would include the following: The economy has to be analyzed as a complex evolving system. Evolution is driven by (partly endogenous) technological, organization, and institutional change. Complexity stems already from the interactions among multiple agents. Heterogeneities are ubiquitous in terms of access to information, capabilities, “models of the world,” and decision processes. More is different. There is no isomorphism between micro behaviors and more aggregate dynamics. The latter is not simply the sum of micro entities but the outcomes of their interactions, most often out-of-equilibrium ones. (Varying degrees of) aggregate order is likely to be an emergent property, stemming from out-of-equilibrium interactions. Dynamics ought to be taken very seriously. Any analysis of the properties of any equilibrium ought to be ideally accompanied by the answers to the question: “how did one get there?”. All this does not rule out the usefulness of simpler, equilibrium models allowing full rationality but taking seriously heterogeneity in information access and capabilities. However, the imperative is that simple models must have even more so properties: if any result applies to simple equilibrium and rationality set-ups, it has to apply even more so to environments where such assumptions cannot apply. In a complex evolving system, it is simply unfeasible to ever achieve an environment of complete markets, which implies that there is no way to ensure that economic plans that involve debt and credit will always be consistent. Thus, it is possible that the system falls into a state of macroeconomic disequilibria associated with intertemporal coordination failures—the failure of a decentralized market economy to deliver a solution that satisfies all equilibrium conditions in a dynamic environment, a theme that macroeconomic theories that intend to shed light on the phenomenon of macroeconomic and debt crises must tackle without assuming the problem away by construction—as in DSGE models. The nature of learning, capabilities accumulation, and innovation is central to the analysis of growth and development. Together, so are the properties of industrial dynamics, structural change, and inter-sectoral interactions. In that setting, supply and demand dynamics interact both in the short- and long-term. Non-linearities are widespread. Learning as such is intrinsically associated with dynamic increasing returns. Those in turn normally involve multiple equilibria and trajectories which are inevitably path dependent. History counts. Such system dynamics are likely to display self-organized criticalities, hysteresis, tipping points, and irreversibilities. The search of proximate laws of motions ought to be encouraged—on, for example, multipliers, accelerators, “learning curves,” as in the cases of Lotka-Volterra processes and Kaldor-Okun laws. Uncertainty in complex evolving environments is endogenous and radical in a Knightian sense: there is no hope of reducing it to probabilizable risk. In such a framework, bounded rationality should not be considered an imperfection, a departure from the fully rational equilibrium case, but rather as the way that agentsbehave, adapt, and learn in a complex environment. In such a framework, often less ismore: in the presence of radical uncertainty, which is quite ubiquitous, one needs to relyon heuristics or other simple rules. The dynamics of socioeconomic systems is nested in a rich thread of institutions and is influenced by a large ensemble of policies which also shape the patterns of interactions and the behaviors of the agents. Inequality is an endemic property of the system and it affects its short- and long-term performance. Its drivers and the policies to curb it ought to be under the spotlight. Finance is not just a “veil” but interacts and influences real dynamics and income distributions. Markets do not work in a vacuum. The functioning of a market economy depends on the laws, rules, norms, and institutional structures under which it operates, all determined by power relations; and the outcomes it produces affect the distribution of power itself. The co-evolution between climate warming and economy should be carefully studied from a complexity perspective, considering the implications for the very survival of humankind and the possible pathways to achieve sustainable growth. Macroeconomics is not an island: we ought to learn from other disciplines, and interdisciplinarity should be encouraged. All these points carry strong policy implications, and our Marco Economics and Development annual Special Issue will encourage their exploration. In support of its aims, the ICC Special Issue will target, among others, the following topics for papers: All macro models focusing on the consequences of heterogenous information and coordination failures. ABM (macro but also at lower levels of aggregation). Models of endogenous macroeconomic and financial instability. Models of macroeconomic and financial crises emergence and resolution. Evolutionary models of growth and development. Networks (with general macro implications). Empirical and theoretical analyses of labor markets and labor relations. Income distribution and inequalities. Trade and development. Post-Keynesian macro analyses. Any empirical papers (such as those by, e.g., G. Katona and G. Gigerenzer) and experimental papers that provide evidence about the behavior of agents, markets, and institutions. Any works that improve agent-based validation, estimation, sensitivity analysis. Applied macroeconometrics addressing complexity, such as, e.g., nonlinearity, heterogeneity. Empirical and theoretical works studying the economic impact of climate change and coevolution between climate and economic dynamics. Political economy written large with special attention to socioeconomic phenomena. Interdisciplinary papers with a macro flavor. Economic history papers related to crises, growth, development, but also to the working of institutions and markets. Analyses of policies, including the reflections of actual policy makers. General topics, including: macroeconomics, debt, development, institutions, climate change, political economy, socioeconomic, and political history. By launching this first of annual special issues on Macro Economics and Development, the ICC Editors are confident that they will be offering original and pathbreaking contributions at this pivotal time of reassessing and restructuring theory and policy into the foreseeable future. e-mail: jes322@columbia.edu

Juan Guillermo Lazo Lazo, Gonzalo Herrera, Luciana Faleti Almeida, Alvaro Talavera

Os mercados de criptomoedas vem chamando a atenção e atraindo todo tipo de investidores, desde pessoas até instituições financeiras, buscando altos retornos resultado de la significativa variação dos preços e a sua rápida valorização. No entanto, esse mercado é caracterizado pelo nível de volatilidade e incerteza, levando os preços a níveis muito altos e também a níveis baixos, estas características geram uma grande dificuldade para a toma de decisões dos gestores de investimentos. Este artigo propõe um sistema híbrido para a tomada de decisões no gerenciamento de investimentos no mercado de criptomoedas, considerando um perfil de investimento conservador, que busca reduzir o risco e maximizar o retorno do investimento. A metodologia visa, com base no preço histórico das criptomoedas, estabelecer níveis de retorno e estimar as probabilidades de transição dos retornos para cada nível, isso é feito com base na análise das cadeias de Markov, que são integradas nas múltiplas árvores de decisão para identificar a criptomoeda que projeta o maior retorno futuro, considerando que será vendida em um ou dois períodos após a aquisição. Os resultados são comparados com os dados reais e comprova-se a eficiência da metodologia.

Makoto Saito

No abstract is available for this record.

Carlos Otávio Ferreira de Almeida, Rodrigo A. Lazaro Pinto

O presente artigo aborda a tributação de um caso hipotético relacionado à exploração comercial de bitcoins no Brasil, tendo por objetivo analisar os impactos da constituição de empresas em duas jurisdições no exterior para exploração, no mercado nacional, da comercialização de bitcoins, assim como as respectivas aplicações das regras de estabelecimento permanente.

John Taskinsoy

No abstract is available for this record.

Juliusz F. Radwanski

No abstract is available for this record.

Anastasiya Chuykova

The article presents the reasons that pushed the government of Venezuela to create the first state-owned cryptocurrency Petro, as well as the context of its introduction and principals of functioning. Unlike other cryptocurrencies Petro is an asset backed by the country’s natural reserves. The author offers to consider it as a token that allows transactions with real money and gives an investor a right to exchange it into the national currency according to Venezuela’s oil quotations. Due to its ICO (initial coin offering) the government managed to attract significant financial resources. Petro already functions as a national payment system and is traded at 8 local exchanges. Although not all aims set by the government have been achieved, the cryptocurrency strengthened the monetary system during the economic crisis and helped to alleviate the influence of American sanctions. In the future it is possible that Petro will be more fully integrated into the country’s financial system or will be rejected as a temporary mechanism. The article’s methodology is based on such general scientific methods as analysis, synthesis, comparison as well as on specific ones: calculation of economic indicators, graphic method and content analysis.

Andreas Veneris, Andreas Park, Fan Long, Poonam Puri

No abstract is available for this record.