Commentaries

The ratification of the modified ESM treaty by the Greek parliament took place easily, and smoothly, without the usual political tensions. The text was submitted to the plenary on the 28th of June 2021 and a week later, on July 6th, it was adopted by a large majority. Only the Greek Communist Party and minor parties of the extreme left and right voted against it. It was practically a non-issue for the mainstream Greek political parties and Greek citizens. Why so?

L'Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), firmato dal Presidente degli Stati Uniti Joe Biden quasi un anno fa (agosto 2022), è il primo importante provvedimento per contrastare il cambiamento climatico che il parlamento degli Stati Uniti abbia mai approvato. La ragione principale di questo successo è che l’IRA non impone oneri all’industria USA ma garantisce molti sussidi.

Bite-back occurs when an innovation has unexpected and unintended effects. It is probably the case that in most cases such consequences are negative, but that is not invariably the case. Bite-back happens because a new technology is by definition an exploration into the unknown, and so it is impossible to predict precisely whether it will do more or less of just very different things from what it was meant to do.

A detailed analysis suggests that the handicap for European producers in the US market will be limited. This small negative effect is likely to be overwhelmed by the much-increased market, implying that the IRA leads to increased opportunities for exports of electric vehicles and renewable inputs to the US. Our calculations suggest that over time the US market for electric vehicles could increase by a factor of 4 and renewables installations should also increase by hundreds of percent. A commentary by Daniel Gros.

As a possible reform of its dispute settlement procedures, the WTO membership should consider carving out trade actions taken under the national security exception (GATT Article XXI) as a case where trading partners have the right to bring non-violation claims but do not have the right to bring violation claims.

The proliferation of advanced generative AI models has unequivocally highlighted what was already foreseeable since the advent of the algorithmic era. The traditional notion of "consent" is no longer a viable proposition in the context of an algorithmic society. Given the increasing sophistication of emerging AI generative models, which legal basis could be a reasonable alternative?

The dynamics of nominal government bond yields at different maturities play a central role in shaping the response of the real economy to monetary and fiscal policy interventions. Yields can be decomposed into two unobservable components: the sequence of expected one-period rates and the term-premia.

A concise introduction into the workings of large language models is presented. We start with an introduction to the attention mechanism, the core of the transformer architecture, which is then followed by a discussion of the steps needed to engineer the base model, a generatively pretrained transfromers (GPT), to a working chatbot like ChatGPT.

“You can do some pretty impressive things with AI as a technological platform, but I am not necessarily an optimist because there are also some very negative paths that AI could take as a technology. We have a confluence of factors that make the negative use of this technology much more probable than positive use”, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu argues.

Il dibattito sulla riforma del Meccanismo Europeo di Stabilità (MES) - che l’Italia rimane l’unico Paese UE a non avere ratificato - è tornato al centro del dibattito politico italiano. All’interno della maggioranza di governo sembrano coesistere due linee di opposizione alla ratifica – una “ideologica” e una “strategica”. Entrambe sono fallaci.