Thursday, July 8, 2010

SED Report

I'm here at the SED (Society for Economic Dynamics) meetings in Montreal. I love this city. The place is very liveable - great in the summer (though it's hot today), and I love the winter here too (that's a Canadian thing, or maybe memories of my grandfather pulling me around in a sled).

Yesterday afternoon, I attended this workshop at the Universite de Montreal (sorry, can't find the accents) on the financial crisis. In this, we got a familiar rehash of events during the crisis, but there were also some noteworthy goings-on.

1. Bob Hall reviewed the key features of the aggregate data in a useful way. Important points were: (i) In terms of the the components of GDP, the downturn is all in consumer durables and investment. It's important, I think, to remember that there are key sectoral aspects to the recession. One initial source of our problems was the poor incentive structure (in the US) that caused us to build more houses than we should have. The ensuing related problems in financial markets had much of their real impact in the markets for durables, where credit is important. (ii) Average labor productivity typically falls in a recession. This time it has not. (iii) An interesting set of labor market observations, which you can see on Rob Shimer's web page relate to the Beveridge curve, or the typical negative correlation between unemployment and vacancies. Since 2000, the data fall on what appears to be a stable Beveridge curve (though of course we know this relationship is no more structural than the Phillips curve). Since late 2009, however, the vacancy rate has been rising, but the unemployment rate has been stuck at just below 10%. For what it's worth, here is an anecdote consistent with these observations. What the data indicates is fundamental mismatch in the labor market, between the skills that firms want and the skills the unemployed have. There is long-run structural change going on in the US economy - including a shift from manufacturing to services, and a shift in demand from low-skilled to high-skilled labor. We're all aware, I think, of the increase in the wage gap that developed 30 or so years ago between college-educated workers and those with less education. The housing boom masked some of what was going on, as it absorbed a lot of low-skilled workers. With the collapse in housing construction, we're stuck with the fallout - what some would call structural unemployment - which is making the unemployment rate higher than it would otherwise be.

2. Narayana Kocherlakota reprised his proposal for "rescue bonds," which I discussed here. This is interesting, but for purely academic reasons. I don't think it has any practical merit, for reasons I discussed in the earlier piece. Lucas made a good point, which left Narayana sputtering a bit. The idea is that, in an economy with a great deal of government intervention, we seem to find externalities everywhere we look. Lucas's example (if my memory has not failed me entirely) concerns a diabetic living in Canada (I'm adding that) who is imposing an "externality" on society if he/she does not treat his/her diabetes - this will just increase health care costs for the rest of us. The fundamental problem, if there is one in this example, really has nothing to do with externalities. Now, the problems of financial regulation Narayana is thinking about have to do with basic frictions - private information and limited commitment. Beginning in the 1970s, economists developed what we now know as mechanism design theory to think about how resources should be allocated in economies with private information and limited commitment. In mechanism design theory, "externality" is not part of the language, and it's not a useful concept. If mechanism design has a problem, it's that it does not tell us how to implement the solution to the mechanism design problem. What is the government supposed to be doing, and what is the private sector supposed to be doing? How do we interpret this solution in terms of "markets" or "regulation?" Obviously we have a lot of work to do.

3. Ed Prescott did pathbreaking work in the economics profession, and his Nobel prize is well-deserved. His work with Finn Kydland made macroeonomists more quantitatively disciplined, and serves as a benchmark for most of the work done in macro in the last 30 years, including New Keynesian economics, models with financial frictions, and incomplete markets models. However, I doubt that there were any people in the room yesterday who took Ed seriously. Ed's key points were: 1. Monetary policy does not matter. 2. Financial factors are the symptoms, not the causes, of the recent downturn. 3. The recession was due to an Obama shock, i.e. labor supply fell because US workers anticipate higher future taxes.* Bob Hall suggested that this would require a Frisch labor supply elasticity of about 27, which seems ridiculous. However, Ed stuck to his guns and thus seemed - well, ridiculous. As a basic framework, the real business cycle model is obviously useful - you can't argue with a basic framework of preferences, endowments, technology, and optimal choice. I think we know by now, though, that financial factors have a lot to do with what we are measuring as TFP (total factor productivity). We certainly should not be listening to suggestions that central banks are irrelevant - these institutions can clearly reallocate resources in a big way when they want to.

*As a commenter pointed out, Prescott may have been talking about capital income taxes, though it was hard to tell. And, as Rody Manuelli pointed out, the labor supply story makes no sense in the context of Prescott economics anyway. In a Prescott world, we would substitute leisure intertemporally in response to higher future labor income tax rates - labor supply in the present would go up, not down.

68 comments:

  1. "Ed Prescott did pathbreaking work..."

    Not if you read the fine print. At the core of the RBC hocus-pokus, Prescott, following Lucas, simply assumes away the real world. Then an elaborate superstructure of pseudo-preferences and ersatz rationality axioms conceals the banishment. In the Lucas/Prescott labor supply model output is directly proportional to hours. That's an assumption that Lionel Robbins dismissed as naive back in 1929! I'd like to know what happened in the intervening 80 years to transform the naive assumption into "pathbreaking".

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  2. "As a basic framework, the real business cycle model is obviously useful - you can't argue with a basic framework of preferences, endowments, technology, and optimal choice. I think we know by now, though, that financial factors have a lot to do with what we are measuring as TFP (total factor productivity)."

    Doesn't the second sentence rather rebut the first? ("As a basic model, you can't argue with including water, sugar,and ice. But lemons are also an aspect of lemonade.")

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  3. But. But. But. Assuming there are no lemons..., Ken.

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  4. Also, in the RBC lemonade model steam works as well as ice. It's all H2O!

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  5. When major figures in the field make arguments like that, why should a non-economist believe that there's a science there at all? If I ask a physicist a question and get a second opinion, if it's about physics, and not about a hypothesis at the far frontier like string theory, the second answer will be the same as the first. This is not true of economics. So all of economics is like string theory, or maybe alchemy.

    As it is, I listen to the economists I agree with politically, just like anyone else. And maybe that's the way it should be. But in that case, why should economists be at the top of the policy-making pyramid?

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  6. Emerson,
    As it is, I listen to the economists I agree with politically, just like anyone else. And maybe that's the way it should be

    No it shouldn't be, and nor is it. Hall and many of the economists who disagree with Prescott do so because of their beliefs over how the economy actually works.

    If it was just politics, then many economists who now disagree with Prescott would actually agree with him.

    I don't expect you to understand or accept that.

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  7. Anonymous,

    Hall and many of the economists who disagree with Prescott do so because of their beliefs over how the economy actually works.

    This is interesting and telling, and actually points up the difference between economics and any kind of science, or indeed any kind of reality-based human interaction.

    In economics, as in no other place, one can provide a theorem which makes bold predictive arguments, which can be carefully matched against the way the world actually works, and then carefully NOT make any predictions from them. And then when one DOES make predictions from them, if one is completely wrong, over and over, one is not required (nor even expected) to mark them down as at best incomplete and at worst verifiably false and move on. No, one just claims loudly that there were other factors at work, make up some more gobbledy-gook, and then go on peddling your theory.

    In science it's obvious what this looks like, but I'd like to show you examples of this in other aspects of life as well:

    "Sure, I know that I'm 40 and have been trying to break into the rock scene since I was 22, and that everyone universally says my music is crap. But I know it's just a combination of jealousy and the fact that the right people haven't heard it yet. And I'm ahead of my time. And I need a different guitar, this one is broken."

    "Well, yeah, I know that the economy of Detroit is going down the crapper and houses are selling for 1/10 of their previous cost. But I'm going to hold onto mine, because the price is sure to come up again soon!"

    "I am a banana!"

    The fact is, we pity everyone else who performs this way, but we give tenure to the economists.

    It leaves me wondering if they actually believe what they are saying, which is one kind of bad, or if they are simply rewarded for saying it.

    -fred

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  8. Prof. Williamson -
    Thank you for a very interesting post. Whenever you have time, could you please elaborate on the following statement: "We certainly should not be listening to suggestions that central banks are irrelevant".

    If you have in mind the non-traditional policy operations that the Fed and other central banks have been conducting during the last two years, you are obviously right. Many of these operations that "clearly reallocate resources in a big way" could, however, just as well have been labeled "fiscal policy" as "monetary policy". My question is whether you think traditional monetary policy is relevant for anything else than purely nominal variables.

    Thanks a lot.

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  9. >Bob Hall suggested that this would require a Frisch labor supply elasticity of about 27

    ROTFLMAO. Well bless him, but only another economist could come up with that rebuttal.

    I mean, the whole basis of all this type of crap is that people are rational actors... did anybody point out to the damn fool that the rational thing to do, if you "anticipate higher taxes in the future" is to double your efforts and squirrel away as much as possible?

    Come to think of it, squirrels are smarter than Prescott - they anticipate Mother Nature taking the nuts away in winter so they collect and save them when they are there. He would apparently collapse into a funk and starve.

    -- a different chris

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  10. Well. All I can say is that it's a shame that most of you people are so confused by economics and what economic science is about. I assure you that these meetings are all about science. We have theory; theory is tested; we draw conclusions from that about how policy works and why. We go to conferences and argue about the science. This is how progress is made. Every science has the same kinds of arguments going on, and when there is lot a stake, and politics mixed in, things are going to look very clouded from the point of view of the layman.

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  11. Ironically, Hall's rebuttal is just as nutty as Prescott's argument. Both assume that taxes have gone up under Obama, when actually they've gone down.

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  12. I won't claim to speak for Ed, but my understanding of the third point is a bit different than yours, Steve. I don't think he really believes that expectations of higher future taxes are depressing labor supply. As you noted, this seems a bit ridiculous. But it does seem reasonable to think that expectations of higher future taxes are depressing private investment, which as you pointed out from Bob Hall's remarks, is one of the major components GDP that is suffering right now. It seems clear that the federal government has borrowed and spent a significant amount over the last 24 months or so. And we have some big obligations looming on the horizon as well (ongoing war costs, social security, and health care, to name a few). Our national debt isn't going away anytime soon, so we either have to cut spending (not likely), monetize the debt (I doubt the Fed will allow for significantly higher inflation), or see higher taxes sometime in the future. The latter seems most likely. If nothing else, it seems we're going to see at least some tax increases as the Bush tax cuts expire. It's clear that taxes affect return on investment, and business unsure of future tax rates might be less willing to make risky investments because of that uncertainty. That was my take on Ed's argument, and it seems reasonable. Let me know if I'm way off base here.

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  13. Gun sales in the US went up when people started believing that Obama was going to win. This effect was before he had won, let alone done anything as president. Investors seeing a statist coming to power could easily decide it is better to invest in other countries. Bigger government is not good for investors.
    http://pair.offshore.ai/causeandeffect/

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  14. High future taxes and regulation can depress current labor supply, notwithstanding Hall and Manuelli. Jaimovic and Rebelo (AER 2010) clearly demonstrated how future shocks can effect things today within the context of the neoclassical growth model. Furthermore, their generalized version of GHH preferences show that this can be down with a zero short-run intertemporal elasticity of labor supply that can still be consistent with long run growth facts. Sounds to me like Prescott will have the last laugh, as always!

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  15. Bloom and Jaimovic have a paper together showing how uncertainty, per se, can have negative effects on the economy. Sounds like Obama is a negative shock.

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  16. Ps Nice blog, Steve!

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  17. One thing that was overlooked:

    Macro is not another word for economic science. It's a subfield that's more like meteorology with poor sensory data than Newtonian physics. Macroeconomists try to tackle QUANTITATIVE implications of their models but the real world is very complex.

    If you are looking for "ask second physicist" kind of thing, the better comparison is game theory or micro theory. There is no ambiguity on how to apply a particular solution.

    As you get closer to empirics it becomes harder because people don't behave like electrons. They might try to impress a human caller but not a robocall. They may have expectations and responses to government policy that animate matter has no analogue for.

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