Suicide in Athens - Remember what touched off the revolution in Tunisia?

That's right, a very public suicide. Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself in December 2010; less than a month later, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had fled the country. The Arab Spring got going in earnest. Now comes the news that a pensioner shot himself in Athens, followed quickly by a wave of rioting (via BBC):

Protesters have clashed with riot police in the Greek capital, Athens, hours after a pensioner shot himself dead outside parliament.

The 77-year-old man killed himself in the city's busy Syntagma Square on Wednesday morning.
Greek media reported he had left a suicide note accusing the government of cutting his pension to nothing.
Flowers have been laid at the spot where he died and tributes have been paid online.
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the square outside parliament on Wednesday evening, the scene of many large protests in recent months.
Violence erupted, with petrol bombs hurled at police, who fired tear gas in response.
Depression and suicides are reported to have increased in Greece as the country introduces tough austerity measures to deal with huge debts.

 'Dignified end'

The man has not been officially identified but was named in Greek media as Dimitris Christoulas. He was said to be a retired chemist, with a wife and a daughter, who had sold his pharmacy in 1994.
He shot himself in the central square just before 09:00 (06:00 GMT), Athens News reports.
In the alleged suicide note, found by police and reported by Athens News, he said: "The government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state.
"And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting... I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don't find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance."
Dozens of people left handwritten messages and flowers at the spot where Mr Christoulas killed himself.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the same course of events will come to pass in Greece... but when people only see their choices as suicide or living out of garbage cans, after paying into the pension system for 35 years, something is VERY wrong. Apparently, the Greek pharmacists' pension fund held a lot of Greek debt, which now got "voluntarily restructured" to be worth 20 cents on the €. 

The News From Spain

can drive you insane...via BBC:

Spain's jobless level hits record 4.75 millionContinue reading the main story

The number of Spanish jobseekers rose for the eighth month in a row in March to hit a record 4.75 million.The Labour Ministry said the number of people filing for unemployment benefits rose by 38,769 with the services sector seeing the most jobs lost.

The jobless rate in Spain stood at 23.6% in February, according to EU figures released on Monday.
Meanwhile, Spain has said its public debt will leap more than 10 percentage points this year to 79.8% of GDP.

Of course, if you are Eurocrat or a finance ministry official, you will think that austerity isn't failing, it just hasn't been tried long and hard enough.

Dutch boy solves Euro crisis

via bloomberg

The Dutch aren't just the tallest people on earth... they are also amongst the smartest. Now comes the news that a 10-year old Dutch boy, Jurre Hermans entered a suggested solution to the Wolfson Economics Prize for finding an exit to the Euro crisis. It comes complete with a diagram summarizing the idea...

Worth an arm and a leg...

or so the expression for valuing something really highly goes. Many economists apply it to top publications - AER, QJE, Emetrica, JPE, RES. And finally, someone actually investigated willingness to pay for a "top 5". Here is the study. Three scholars in the Netherlands conducted a survey amongst economists, and found that they valued the AER higher than all other journals. Willingness to pay on average was $12,000 (and nearly $10,000 for a QJE). The same people also were asked how much of their life expectancy they would sacrifice for a publication. For the AER, that's 0.77 years; for the QJE, 0.55. This is close to the values for how much lifetime people are willing to give up to keep their right thumb (1 year). Note, however, that these are the average responses; medians are much lower, which implies that a handful of (presumably desperate) characters are skewing the results big-time.

Covering the globe - applicants from 40 countries

A month ago, I showed a little map of the world where our applicants come from. It turned out to be by far the most popular post of the last month, so here is the this month's update. We had students interested in studying with us from 26 countries at the beginning of the month. Now, we have applicants from 40. The US is the single biggest source of applications, followed by Italy, Germany, Canada, Spain, and India. At the same time, there are also some surprising white spots on the map -- we have no Russian, South African, UK, or Brazilian applicants as of yet. Nonetheless, as you can see, we are doing pretty well covering the globe... the range and quality of candidates is nothing short of astonishing, if I may say so (having been involved with applications to ITFD since 2007).

ITFD => Harvard

Congratulations to Edoardo Campanella (ITFD 2009/10), who just won admission to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. After the year in Barcelona, Edoardo went off to work, first for the WTO in Geneva, then as an economic advisor for the Italian Senate after graduating with a Master's degree from ITFD. He has also been a prolific commentator and writer on economic issues.  The MPA he is now going for is one of the most competitive and prestigious postgraduate programs in the world, designed for people who want to work in the highest levels of public administration. For example, the German government sends a handful of the best graduates from the German National Honors Foundation to this program through the McCloy program every year. 

Sex and the Banker - Aristophanes edition

In Aristophanes' Lystrata, the women end a war by withholding sexual favors. High-end Spanish hookers are now using the same idea, exploiting bankers' libido as a pressure point to get the economy moving again. According to news reports, the assocation of luxury sex workers has decided that its members should not offer services to bankers until the country's financial institutions start making loans to families and small- and medium-sized companies... let's see if it works better than quantitative easing.