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Gindo Tampubolon, Lecturer in Poverty, Global Development Institute The Conference of Parties (COP) 26 and its Glasgow Pact to phase-down coal remind the world once again of the need to come up with innovative technology to adapt and to mitigate the effects of our changing climate. This amplifies the original call from the UN World […]
The post Corruption and innovation II: green innovations around the world appeared first on Global Development Institute Blog.

Gindo Tampubolon, Lecturer in Poverty, Global Development Institute The Conference of Parties (COP) 26 and its Glasgow Pact to phase-down coal remind the world once again of the need to come up with innovative technology to adapt and to mitigate the effects of our changing climate. This amplifies the original call from the UN World […]
The post Corruption and innovation II: green innovations around the world appeared first on Global Development Institute Blog.

Innovationspartnerschaft zwischen Deutschland und Japan: Hier prallt Japans praktisch-konkreter Ansatz auf Deutschlands strategische Visionen. Ein Blick über Grenzen, der zukünftige Wege aufzeigt.
Der Beitrag Was Deutschland jetzt von Japan bei Innovationen lernen kann erschien zuerst auf Das Progressive Zentrum.

From WSJ "Many Americans who want to move are trapped in their homes—locked in by low interest rates they can't afford to give up. These "golden handcuffs" are keeping the supply of homes for sale unusually low and making the market more competitive and pricey than some forecasters expected.   The reluctance of homeowners to sell differentiates the current housing market from past downturns and could keep home prices from falling significantly on a national basis, economists say."What's going on? US 15 or 30 year fixed-rate mortgages have a catch -- you can't take it with you. If interest rates go up, and you want to move, you can't take the old mortgage with you. You have to refinance at the higher interest rate. It's curiously asymmetric, as if interest rates go down you have the right to refinance at a lower rate. As a result, yes, people stay in houses they would rather sell in order to keep the low interest rate on their fixed rate mortgage. They then don't free up houses that someone else would really rather buy. (In California, the right to keep paying low property taxes, which reset if you buy a new house also keeps some people where they are. And everywhere, transfer taxes add a small disincentive to move.) This is a curious contract structure. Why can't you take a mortgage with you, and use it to pay for a new house? Sure, mortgages with that right would cost more; the rate would be a bit higher initially. But fixed rate mortgages already cost more than variable rate mortgages, and people seem willing to pay for insurance against rising rates. I can imagine that plenty of people might want to buy that insurance to make sure they can live in a house of given cost, though not necessarily this house.  Conversely, fixed-rate mortgages that did not give the right to refinance, where you have to pay a penalty to get out of the contract if rates go down, would also be cheaper up front, yet people aren't screaming for those. Even the right to refinance at a lower rate is weird. A straightforward mortgage would have a 30 year fixed rate, but automatically lower that rate as other interest rates go down. Instead, you have to go through the formalities of refinancing, which adds a lot of fixed costs to the decision. I know a lot of very sophisticated finance people. Not one has ever reported that they've really solved the complex option pricing problem, when is it optimal to refinance a conventional mortgage?The 15 and 30 year fixed rate mortgage, with right to refinance, is peculiar to the US. You can't make a psychological argument for it. Most of Europe has variable rate mortgages. And a lot less interest rate risk on bank balance sheets! So why are we here, and given that we are here why does this strange contract seem so resistant to innovation. I think the answer is simple: 15 and 30 year fixed rate mortgages were a creation of the federal government during the Great Depression. And today the vast majority of mortgages are securitized via Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, VA etc, along with a generous government guarantee. Those have to conform to specific contract structures. You can't innovate better contracts and then pass the loan on via government agencies. (Commenters, correct me if I'm wrong. My recollection of the history is foggy here.) This all points to an interesting and usually unsung problem with extensive government intervention in the mortgage market: It freezes contract terms. Contracts that might be very popular -- such as the right to transfer the mortgage to a new house, or the right to settle up in both directions, marking the mortgage to market so you can pay a new higher rate -- don't get innovated. Updates:The is not, of course, a particularly original thought. Alexei Alexandrov, Laurie Goodman, and Ted Tozer at Urban Institute have a nice article advocating streamlined refinancing. They also point out the Fed should care, as it wants interest rates faced by borrowers to adjust more quickly. Ted Tozer points out that you can leave it behind -- a new buyer can assume an existing mortgage. However this feature doesn't often get used. I once was at the Swedish central bank talking about monetary policy. They were worried about raising interest rates. I presumed they were worried that too big to fail banks would have trouble. No, they said. In Sweden practically all mortgages are floating rate. And you can't just mail in the keys and default on mortgages. If you default, they take all your assets and garnish your wages. (So much for soft hearted socialist Scandinavia.  They are actually quite attuned to incentives.) The banks were going to be fine. They were worried that if they raised interest rates, people would do anything to pay their higher mortgage rates, and this would tank consumption. Talk about effective monetary policy! At the time however they were worried about house prices, and didn't want effective monetary policy. Long story short, mortgage contracts matter.  (Martin Flodén, Matilda Kilström, Jósef Sigurdsson and Roine Vestman document this "cashflow channel" in the Economic Journal. It's on the back of my mind also in the search for better mechanisms to understand whether and how higher interest rates lower inflation.)  Roger Baris writes: I thought you might want to know a bit about the Danish mortgage market, which basically has the features both you and the Urban Institute mention.1. A very old securitization market. Created in the early 19th century to help rebuild Copenhagen after the Brits shelled it when Denmark complied with Napoleon's "Continental System" which blockaded trade with England. I guess the Brits really hated being cut off from all that fine Danish butter and bacon.2. At the initiation of the mortage, the borrower basically swaps his commitment to pay a 30-yr, fixed rate mortgage for bonds in a large, largely homogeneous  (with respect to maturity and interest rate) bond issuance. The bonds are then sold at the prevailing market price, with the proceeds providing the financing for the house buyer.3. The loan is prepayable at any time. Like the UI proposal, the originating bank (which continues to service the loan) actually prompts borrowers with high interest rates to prepay (since the bank earns some fees in the process and therefore has an economic motivation). There is no re-underwriting of the loan at this point so long as the amount of the loan does not increase. This is a very quick and very cheap process. This is used if interest rates fall (in which case, the borrower's new loan is instantly securitized into a new bond issuance with uniform characteristics, with an equivalent amount of the old bond being prepaid) or if the borrower wants to prepay the loan for a house move. (If I remember correctly, the loan may be also be "portable" to a new house but in this case, the value of the new house has to be re-underwritten.)4. Note that the servicer in a US mortage is contractually forbidden to prompt prepayments in this manner, although enforcement of this provision is sometimes difficult, as you can imagine.5. If interest rates rise, conversely, the borrower has the option (if he/she wants to prepay the loan for any reason, especially a house move) of going into the bond market (which is highly liquid with large, uniform pools) and buying an equivalent face amount of bonds (at a discount because rates have risen) and then delivering these bonds to extinguish his/her mortgage liability.6. In practice, all the bond market activity (both at issuance and extinguishing) is handled for the borrower by a mortgage bank. The net effect of all of this - the loan prepayment right, the "portability" and the option to deliver bonds to extinguish a loan - is to make the embedded interest rate option in a Danish fixed-rate mortgage more optimal than the same option in a US mortgage. This means that, as you would expect, the borrower pays a higher "spread" on the loan from the beginning in return for the greater optionality.PS. The Danish mortgage system also has some interesting characteristics in terms of mutualizing risk; these characteristics also interact with the interest rate option. 

How to align research and innovation with values, needs and expectations of society? During the past ten years, researchers, policy-makers and funders in Europe have developed and supported the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach to address societal aspects of research and innovation early on.
The post Responsible Research and Innovation training appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Inga Ulnicane How to align research and innovation with values, needs and expectations of society? During the past ten years, researchers, policy-makers and funders in Europe have developed and supported the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach to address societal aspects of research and innovation early on. This approach aims to go beyond risk management […]
The post Responsible Research and Innovation training appeared first on Europe of Knowledge.

The government has responded to calls to invigorate Australia's defence innovation enterprise with a commitment to stand up a new program in the Department of Defence with funding of $3.4 billion over the next decade. ...

Why have labor and productivity growth slowed?

Software entrepreneur-turned-academic researcher, James Bessen, argues the problem isn't fewer productive startups, or M&A activity (which has actually slowed), but big corporations dominating by mastering "proprietary" software — the intersection of technology and data — which has had major negative societal consequences. He walks Luigi and Bethany through examples such as IBM, Amazon Web Services, Volkswagen, and more to discuss what's wrong with our current patent system and makes a case for opening up technology, data, and knowledge in order to restore competition.

Bessen is the Executive Director of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative at Boston University and his book, "The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation", is out now.

The UK has a crucial role to play in the debate over how the EU should be reformed. This session engages in a conversation as to why and how.

What follows is an interview by Project Syndicate with Angela Huyue Zhang, author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs its Economy (Oxford University Press, 2024). Project Syndicate: In 2020, Chinese regulators ...

The story of Darwin really begins with the necessity to establish a support route for the Overland Telegraph to the southern states of Australia. In November 1871, the 1,100-mile submarine cable between Darwin and Banjoewangie in Java ...

Self-driving vehicles have the potential to radically transform the UK's roads. But to enable their benefits and achieve the government's ambition to 'make the UK the best place in the world to deploy connected and automated vehicles', developers and manufacturers …

By Riccardo Crescenzi (LSE), Arnaud Dyèvre (LSE) and Frank Neffke (Complexity Science Hub, Vienna) How do new centres of technological excellence emerge? R&D activities of foreign multinationals can act as powerful boosters of local innovation and growth in the cities where they invest. However, for the most innovative multinational companies, the risk of leaking knowledge to … Continued

Building and using AI systems fairly can be challenging, but is hugely important if the potential benefits from better use of AI are to be achieved. Recognising this, the government's recent white paper "A pro-innovation approach to AI regulation" proposes …

'Defence acquisition has to improve. We have to get equipment faster and we have to make sure we spend our limited funds on the best possible equipment, to give our troops a capability edge.' — ...