1/ Deaths: 119 deaths today, more than 32K since the beginning of the pandemic according to official estimates. But rate is slowly but constantly approaching zero.
2/ 669 new cases today. Combining this number with deaths and recoveries, the total number of active cases today drops by 1570 units and is currently around 57K. Also the rate of new cases is on stable downward path.
3/ Testing: in last weeks we have been running about 75K tests/day, excluding weekends when tests 50% lower. Note that number of test different from number of people tested, as people typically tested more than once. Positive-to-test ratio approaching zero. This is a good news.
4/ Hospital situation: number of patients in ICU has dropped from the peak around 4K to less than 1K. Every day this number continues to decrease. Also patients with less severe symptoms and in quarantine at home are less and less.
5/ Regional analysis: most of the new cases in two regions. Lombardia (350 new cases a day in the last three days) and Piemonte (84 new cases a day in the last three days). Regions in the south have close to zero new cases in last days.
6/ Note that also in terms of evolution of current cases, situation in Lombardia is not improving as fast as in other parts of the country.
Overall, for the moment the situation does not raise alarms. Hopefully it will only further improve. Next week we will have more data to track the evolution. In the meantime, wearing a mask out probably is a good idea, to protect you and the people around you.
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I am very excited to share my new working paper titled “#Crypto Risk Premia” (with Daniele Massacci, @RubinMirco and Dario Ruzzi). A short 🧵 follows. Please, share it if you like it. Comments are very welcome [1/n]
Before “crypto winter” hit markets at the beginning of 2022, cryptocurrency was getting “boring” as some of the craziness of the earlier times was fading out and institutional investors had started to pour in, allocating a part of their large portfolios to crypto. [2/n]
To inform investment and risk management decisions, and guide portfolio allocation to crypto assets, it is fundamental to i) identify the set of risk factors driving crypto returns and ii) correctly quantify the prices associated with these sources of risk. [3/n]
The paper shows that sudden and large price moves in bitcoin prices (jumps) explain a large portion in the variation in bitcoin returns [2/n]
Study tail-risk in crypto markets is important for at least two reasons 1/ is tail-risk priced similarly to that in equity markets? 2/ to characterize the SDF of the marginal investor and price alternative cryptocurrencies and tokens and do risk-management [3/n]
The narrative of the rollercoaster day for cryptocurrency markets centers around the fears of stricter regulation in China (which might want to push its future CBDC). I shamlessy take the opportunity to advertise some of my prior work [1/n] #EconTwitter ft.com/content/c4c29b…
In Borri and Shakhnov (FRL 2019) we look at a similar big shock when China de facto ordered the closing of cryptocurrency exchanges. [2/n]
The shock had a huge effect on the global share of trading volume that took place on Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges: in a matter of months it went from 90% to less than 1% (caveat: part of it could have been wash trading) [3/n]
Our paper is motivated by recent work by @HannoLustig et al. (AER 2019) who found that currency carry trade strategies with T-bonds are different from those with T-bills because local currency term premia offset currency premia 2/n
Results in Lustig et al. (AER 2019) are for advanced economies with no/low default risk and imply that the volatility of the permanent component of investors’ SDF must be equalized across countries 3/n
We focus on Italy -- one of the first country struck by #COVIDー19 -- where the lockdown design offers a source of exogenous variation in the intensity of the lockdown at a granular level 2/n
In the second (economic) lockdown (March 22) the Italian government defined a detailed list of essential economic activities. All other activities were either suspended or allowed to operate only remotely 3/n
I am very happy to share that my paper "Optimal Taxation with Home Ownership and Wealth Inequality" with Pietro Reichlin has been now accepted for publication at the @RevEconDyn [1/n] #EconTwitter
In the paper we consider optimal taxation in a model with wealth-poor and wealth-rich households, where wealth derives from business capital and home ownership, and investigate the consequences of a rising wealth inequality at steady state on these tax rates [2/n]
We find that the optimal tax structure includes some taxation of labor, zero taxation of financial and business capital, and critically a housing wealth tax on the wealth-rich households and a housing subsidy on the wealth-poor households [3/n]