Category Archives: PSST and Macro

Another AS-AD Anomaly

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Timothy Taylor writes,

[Alan] Krueger argues that the patterns of wage changes and unemployment are roughly what one should expect. He focuses only on short-term employment (that is, employment less than 27 weeks), on the grounds that the long-term unemployed are more likely to be detached from the labor force and thus will exert less pressure on wages. Increases in real wages are measured with the Employment Cost Index data collected by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and then subtracting inflation as measured by the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. In the figure below, the solid line shows the relationship between short-term unemployment and changes in real wages for the period from 1976-2008. (The dashed lines show the statistical confidence intervals on either side of this line.) The points labelled in blue are for the years since 2008. From 2009-2011, the points line up almost exactly on the relationship predicted from earlier data. For 2012-2014, the points are below the predicted relationship, although still comfortably within the range of past experience (as shown by the confidence intervals). For the first quarter of 2015, the point is above the historical prediction.

As an aside, note the particular selection of data series. I am not saying that Krueger is wrong for choosing short-term unemployment, the employment cost index, and the PCE deflator. In fact, I think he shows good taste here. But there are other choices available, and I can think of economists who have defiantly done so, cheered on by other prominent economists.

What I wish to point out is that the relationship as depicted is an anomaly with respect to textbook AS-AD, including both Keynesian economics and Sumnernomics. Timothy Taylor refers to the relationship as a Phillips Curve. However, the Phillips Curve relates nominal wages to unemployment, and the chart shows real wages and unemployment. Although in standard macro nominal wages may rise as the unemployment rate falls, real wages are supposed to move in the opposite direction. In standard macro, aggregate supply is derived from movement along the demand curve for labor. When real wages rise by less than productivity increases, demand for labor rises and output goes up. When real wages rise by more than productivity increases, demand for labor falls and output goes down.

Thus, rather than confirming conventional macroeconomic analysis, Krueger’s chart demonstrates an anomaly. In fact, this is hardly a new anomaly. The procyclical behavior of real wages was something that I had observed when I was in graduate school more than 40 years ago.

Of course, you can modify the Keynesian model to accommodate procyclical real wages. Or, you can find data that you believe demonstrate countercyclical real wages (I think that Sumner would try this latter approach). But that is because Keynesian economics is what I call an interpretive framework. How many anomalies you can tolerate before you discard an interpretive framework is a matter of choice. For me, the AS-AD paradigm has too many anomalies to live with.

Creating Inflation Consciousness

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Scott Sumner writes,

The simplest solution is to commit to buy T-bonds (and, if needed, Treasury-backed MBSs) until TIPS spreads show 4% expected inflation. At that high an inflation rate you don’t need much QE, because the public and banks don’t want to hold much base money.

My reply:

1. Central banks have tried many times to commit to pegging exchange rates, which in principle seems easier to do than pegging an inflation rate. These attempts have often failed, as the central bank finds itself overwhelmed by private speculators. This suggests to me that one should be skeptical of the effectiveness of open-mouth operations.

2. Suppose that the Fed backed up its commitment to 4 percent inflation with a lot of action. My belief is that it would take a great deal of action–an order of magnitude more than what we have seen.

3. By the time inflation reached its 4 percent target, there would be a great deal of “inflation consciousness” among investors and in the general public. We would get into a regime of high and variable inflation. You do not know whether inflation would tend toward 4 percent, 8 percent, or 12 percent.

4. In this regime of high and variable inflation, prices would lose some of their informational value, as people find it harder to sort out relative price changes from general inflation. This would be detrimental to economic activity. Scott and I both remember the 1970s, and from a macroeconomic perspective, they were not pretty.

5. So fairly soon, you would see a reversal of policy, with Scott complaining about the stupidity of the Fed overshooting its inflation target. The Fed would take dramatic action to undo what it did before.

6. After several painful years, we would be back to the regime of low and stable inflation.

Schumpeter 1, Galbraith 0

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Mark Perry writes,

In other words, only 12.2% of the Fortune 500 companies in 1955 were still on the list 60 years later in 2015, and nearly 88% of the companies from 1955 have either gone bankrupt, merged with (or were acquired by) another firm, or they still exist but have fallen from the top Fortune 500 companies (ranked by total revenues). Most of the companies on the list in 1955 are unrecognizable, forgotten companies today (e.g. Armstrong Rubber, Cone Mills, Hines Lumber, Pacific Vegetable Oil, and Riegel Textile).

Patterns of sustainable specialization and trade are in constant flux.

Angus Deaton vs. The Representative Agent

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His Nobel citation says,

The insights provided by Deaton’s work on consumption and income have had a lasting influence on
modern macroeconomic research. Previous researchers in macroeconomics, from Keynes onwards, had
relied only on aggregate data. Even if their purpose is to understand relationships at a macro level, today’s
researchers usually start at the individual level and then, with great caution, add together individual
behaviors to compute numbers for the entire economy.

What Else Would be True?

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Chris Dillow writes,

we should remember the Big Facts. For example, one the Big Facts in finance is that active equity fund managers rarely beat the market for very long, at least after fees. This, as much as Campbell Harvey’s statistical work reminds us to be wary of the hundreds of papers claiming to find factors that beat the market.

Pointer from Mark Thoma

This is a good example of asking, “What else would be true?” When you are inclined to believe that a study shows X, consider all of the implications of X. In the example above, Dillow is suggesting that if one finds that there is some factor that allows one to earn above-market returns, how do we reconcile that with the fact that we do not observe active fund managers earning above-market returns?

Recall that I raised a similar question about the purported finding that in the United States worker earnings have gone nowhere as productivity increased. This should greatly increase the demand for labor. It should greatly increase international competitiveness, turning us into an export powerhouse. Since I do not see either of those taking place, and since many economists have pointed to flaws in the construction of the comparison of earnings and productivity, I think this makes the purported finding highly suspect.

In contrast, consider the view that assortative mating has increased and plays an important role in inequality. I have not seen anyone say, “IF that were true, then we would expect to observe Y, and Y has not happened.”

I think that this is the way to evaluate interpretive frameworks in economics. Consider many possible implications of an interpretive framework. Relative to those implications, do we observe anomalies? When you have several anomalies, you may choose to overlook them or to explain them away, but you should at least treat the anomalies as caution flags. If instead you keep finding other phenomena that are consistent with the interpretive framework, then that should make you more comfortable with using that framework.

The Puzzle of Low Real Interest Rates and Low Investment

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Antonio Fatas writes,

What the world is missing is investment demand. The real tragedy is that investment in physical capital has been weak at the time when financial conditions have been so favorable. Why is that? Jason Furman (and early the IMF) argues that the best explanation is that this the outcome of a a low growth environment that does not create the necessary demand to foster investment. And this starts sounding like a story of confidence and possibly self-fulfilling crises and multiple equibria. But that is another difficult topic in economics so we will leave that for a future post.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

The puzzle in macroeconomic data is that the real interest rate is low and investment is low. There are a number of stories, none of them fully convincing.

In the Keynesian category, we have:

1. Low “animal spirits.” As far as I know, no one has actually propounded this.

2. Accelerator model. That is, when other forms of spending are high, investment is high. So when spending by households goes down, investment goes down. I put Furman (and most Keynesians) in this camp.

In the non-Keynesian category, we have:

3. Real interest rates are actually high, because prices are falling. This is perhaps more plausible if you think about sectoral price movements. If the price indexes go up because of college tuition and health insurance, then prices elsewhere may be falling.

4. Real interest rates are actually high for risky investment. Interest rates on government debt and on high-grade private bonds are a misleading indicator of the marginal cost of capital.

5. Crowding-out can occur at low interest rates. That is, if financial intermediaries are gorging on government debt, they may not seek out private-sector borrowers.

These explnations are not mutually exclusive.

Specialization and Trade

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Chelsea German writes,

Last week, I wrote about a man who spent 6 months of his life and $1,500 to make a sandwich entirely from scratch, without the benefits of market exchange. The story illustrates how exchange and trade enrich our lives.

After making his incredibly costly sandwich, the same man embarked on an even costlier endeavor: making a suit from scratch. He picked cotton from a field, spun the cotton into thread, wove the thread into cloth, sheared wool from a sheep, harvested hemp, raised silkworms for their silk, killed a deer and tanned its hide to make leather. This process cost him 10 months of work and $4,000.

Pointer from Don Boudreaux.

I just don’t think you capture the phenomenon of specialization and trade with textbook economic models. It is not two-by-two trade. It is far more complex than that. And don’t get my started on representative-agent models of the GDP factory.

Did Scott Sumner Stumble?

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He wrote,

Unfortunately, the Fed doesn’t get to decide the path of interest rates. It looks like they do, but that’s a cognitive illusion. The bond market determines the path of interest rates, reflecting factors such as global credit markets, as well as NGDP growth and the level of NGDP in the US.

I am fond of Winston Churchill’s remark about someone who “stumbles across the truth, but then picks himself up as if nothing happened.”

That is what I feel took place here. I think that the implication of the quoted sentences is that it is the bond market, not the Fed, that is in control. As I write in the Book of Arnold, the Fed is just another bank. It has no more ability to “target” macroeconomic variables than does Citibank. Of course, Citibank is free to set a ridiculous interest rate for its on loans and deposits, and so is the Fed. And if the Fed set a ridiculous rate on reserves (right now negative 1 percent would be ridiculous, as would positive 5 percent) lots of crazy things would happen. With a negative rate on reserves, cash would dominate reserves as an asset. With a rate of 5 percent, reserves would dominate pretty much any loan as an asset.

But leave aside such hypotheticals. The Fed is not the macroeconomic driver it is made out to be.

Olivier Blanchard Profiled

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By Steven Pearlstein. The profile says a lot of good things about Blanchard, most of which are true. But it also includes this:

But for Blanchard, who had spent the better part of his career helping to build the new consensus, the crisis had not only revealed the inadequacies of what had been done so far but raised questions about whether it was possible to come up with one all-purpose economic model.

…“We ignored the financial plumbing,” Blanchard said. “We thought we could model it with a few simple equations,” he explained, based on what turned out to be false assumptions about the ready availability of buyers and sellers and the easy substitution of one financial instrument for another.

I would say that Pearlstein’s article suffers a bit from an excessive reliance on MIT insider economists as sources. And as Larry Summers put it, “But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

The insiders created the artificial consensus around representative-agent, rational-expectations models with no institutional or historical perspective on finance. And they have not really moved very far from that consensus. For better or worse, macroeconomics is where it is today because of MIT’s insider economists, exemplified by Blanchard.

Matthew Kahn Asks the Tough Question

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He writes,

Is Professor Summers saying that the subset of scholars who were studying macro have been collectively wasting their lives?

Pointer from Mark Thoma. I believe that they have been wasting their lives. I believe it even more strongly after reading Randall Wray’s Why Minsky Matters. The time-wasters treat the history and institutional characteristics of financial intermediaries as irrelevant. Minsky, correctly, thought that these things were important.