Brazilian Inflation

This marvelous plot comes from an interesting article, The Monetary and Fiscal History of Brazil, 1960-2016 by Joao Ayres, Marcio Garcia, Diogo A. Guillén, and Patrick J. Kehoe. The article is part of the Becker-Friedman Institute Project, complete with a big and now easily available data collection effort, and forthcoming book. 

If you want a deep historical and economic analysis of fiscal and monetary interactions, this is an amazing resource. And it summarizes historical episodes that North Americans just might want to know more about soon! 

(HT Ricardo Reis who pointed it out in a great discussion last week, that I will post as soon as it's available.) 

Infrastructure and jobs

William Gropper, Construction of the Dam, 1938

To many on the left, it's always 1933. Building "roads and bridges" will "create jobs," soaking up the mass army of unemployed desperate for work that they seem to see. 

Driving around though, I notice that we build roads with big machines, not lots of people. And construction jobs are high-skill jobs, not people with shovels. "Shovel-ready" itself is a misnomer. Nobody uses shovels on a construction site anymore, they use a backhoe. Neither you, reading this, nor I, nor an unemployed Wal-Mart greeter or bartender could do much of anything useful on a road construction site. 

On a lark, I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to see just how many people are employed on roads and bridge construction. 

	Latest	Feb-Mar change
Total nonfarm	144,120.0	916
Construction of buildings	1,689.3	17.8
Heavy and civil engineering construction	1,062.9	27.3
Water and sewer system construction	183.8
Oil and gas pipeline construction	134.9
Power and communication system construction	211.3
Highway street and bridge construction	338.3
Specialty trade contractors	4,714.2	65.0

For perspective, total nonfarm employment is 144 million people, up nearly a million in the last month. That's a lot, usually 200,000 is a good month. Well, we're recovering fast from the pandemic. In case you didn't hear the pounding of nails, building construction employees 1.6 million people, with 4.7 million more in the trades. (We're not so much building new housing as building in new places.) 

Total unemployment is 9.7 million right now, down from 23 million at its peak. 

Roads and bridges employ 338,000 people. The total is a half of this month's gain alone.  We could use some water construction here in California, though it's not going to happen, and with only 184,000 people employed there looks to be room to expand. 135,000 are building oil and gas pipelines. Uh-oh.

Inequality mirage?

David Splinter and Gerald Auten gave last week's Hoover Economic Policy Working Group seminar, summarizing their past and some work in progress on the distribution of income.  Link in case the above embed does not work. A recent paper. Splinter's web page. 

Splinter and Auten are very even handed, just-the-facts, economists. I'll pass on their facts. Grumpy interpretations are my own. 

It is a fact generally accepted that income inequality has grown a lot recently, and this is a "problem" to be "solved." So what if the great inequality crisis simply isn't true? Let's leave aside whether income is a good measure (it isn't), let's just look at the fact, has income inequality substantially increased? 

No. Here is the headline result. In their careful redoing of the numbers, the top 1% share of income has barely budged since the 1970s. (And, by the way, if you think the mid 1970s economy was the great happy prosperity we should try to reestablish, you're too young to remember the 1970s.)

Now we get in to a deep under the hood exercise about costing up income, and where did Piketty and Saez go wrong. The video has some of that. The papers have more, and a long list of back and forth, including comparisons with many other studies. I'll name just a few.

Omitted income.   Piketty Saez leave out many kinds of income. Auten Splinter attribute all national income to somebody.  Before 1986 many wealthy people were incorporated.  Leaving out corporate income biases the early shares down. Auten Splinter fix that. Pre-tax and transfer income! Who cares about pre-tax income! Auten Splinter calculate income after taxes at the top -- lower -- and including transfers at the bottom -- higher. Demographics. Marriage rates have fallen, so Auten Splinter calculate income by individuals. Benefits! They include benefits like employer-provided health insurance.

One can quibble, but one can quibble. At least this cornerstone "fact" of political debate is a lot less sure than it looks. 

If the rich aren't getting richer, the poor aren't getting poorer:

Paper, silver, deficits and inflation -- Chinese history version

A history of paper money and inflation in China, from Edward Chancellor's Wall Street Journal review of Jin Xu's Empire of Silver.  In these sparse paragraphs is most of monetary (and fiscal!) theory, along with a history I was not aware of.

Paper money, Ms. Xu tells us, dates back to the Tang dynasty in the ninth century, when the authorities allowed merchants to exchange bronze coins for promissory notes, known as “flying cash.” Two centuries later, in the time of the Song dynasty, merchants in Sichuan were using private exchange notes in place of the cumbersome iron coinage. The Song emperor issued his own paper money against deposits of coin. The jiaozi, as these notes were called, proved so popular that they traded at a premium to cash.

The convenience of paper money proved its undoing, however. The first temptation was for the Song authorities to make the jiaozi inconvertible, severing the connection with metal reserves. The next step was to increase the issue of paper money, both to feed the people and, more pressingly, to fund the fight against the Mongol invaders. The inevitable outcome was inflation, followed by the collapse of the currency.

r < g

r<g is an essay on the question whether r<g means the government can borrow and not worry about repaying debts. No. 

Abstract:

A situation that the rate of return on government bonds r is less than the economy's growth rate g seems to promise that borrowing has no fiscal cost. r<g is irrelevant for the current US fiscal problems. r<g cannot begin to finance current and projected deficits. r<g does not resolve exponentially growing debt. r<g can finance small deficits, but large deficits still need to be repaid by subsequent surpluses. The appearance of explosive present values comes by using perfect-certainty discount formulas with returns drawn from an uncertain world. Present values can be well behaved despite r<g. The r<g opportunity is like the classic strategy of writing put options, which fails in the most painful state of the world.

The essay is based on comments I gave at the spring NBER EFG meeting on Ricardo Reis' "The constraint on public debt when r<g but g<m." My discussion starts here at 4:48,  Ricardo presents the paper (very good, worth listening to, many points I didn't get to) at 4:30 

pdf for now, as translating equations to blogger is taxing. 

Gamestop. 1999 déjà vu all over again?

In case you haven't noticed, Gamestop and a few similar stocks are in a classic bubble. At least it was at 8 AM pacific when I read the print WSJ, possibly not at 9:30 AM as I write. What's going on?

It's not the only time. This sort of thing has happened over and over again through history, most recently in the late 1990s. It's too easy to just say "people are dumb," and move on. That can explain everything. Instead, we can and should as always look at a repeated phenomenon like this and try to understand how the rules of the game are producing a weird outcome, despite pretty smart players. 

The best and most prescient analysis I know are Owen Lamont's "Go Down Fighting: Short Sellers vs. Firms," (last working paper, ungated here) Owen's classic paper with Dick Thaler, Can the Market Add and Subtract? Mispricing in Tech Stock Carve‐outs and of course my "Stocks as money" which offered (I think) a different and more cohesive view of the Add and Subtract event, and extended it to other situations.

There are four essential characteristics of these events, along with a few corollaries spelled out in my paper:  

1. Securities are overpriced. 
2. Trading volume is enormous. There is a big demand for short-term trading. There is some fundamental news and a lot of talk about the stock.  
3. There are constraints on short sales, limiting the ability to take a long-term bet on the downside.
4. There are constraints on the supply of shares,  among them the same short sale constraints. 

The first is obvious. The second through fourth however sharply limit our view of what is going on. Simple irrationality, people get attached to a stock, can explain overpricing, but not mad turnover, why they would sell it a day later. 

Bisin on MMT Rhetoric

Alberto Bisin has written an intriguing short review of Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth. Alberto focuses on the rhetoric of MMT and the book. (My review here FYI.) 

MMT's rhetoric is surely its most salient feature. It has been phenomenally successful in terms of gaining attention, and it has eschewed all the traditional rhetoric of economics -- academic articles, conference presentations, monographs full of equations, econometric estimates and tests, or even mountains of charts and graphs, PhD students fanning out to develop it. 

[In response to JZ comment, that is not necessarily good or bad, it's just a fact. The conventional economic rhetoric produces a lot of garbage, too.  Bryan Caplan has a point. The major distinction may be engagement with critics, which happens in conventional discourse and so far has been largely absent with MMT.]  

Kelton's book is unusual in MMT rhetoric for appearing to be one definitive source that would lay it out, following standard rhetoric. The trouble with writing a book is that sometimes people read it carefully, and are emboldened that they aren't missing something in the usual flurry of blog posts tweets and videos. Then the world finds out the ideas in it are empty, the rhetoric artifice rather than explanatory. 

(NB, "rhetoric" has gained an unfortunate pejorative in common usage. I mean no such pejorative. How we structure economic discussion is hugely important. If you have not read Deirdre McCloskey's Rhetoric of Economics article or subsequent books, do so immediately.)    

Alberto: 

The book should be seen as a rhetorical exercise. Indeed, it is the core of MMT that appears as merely a rhetorical exercise. As such it is interesting, but not a theory in any meaningful sense I can make of the word. The T in MMT is more like a collection of interrelated statements floating in fluid arguments. Never is its logical structure expressed in a direct, clear way, from head to toe.

A Neo-Fisherian Challenge and Reconciliation

 Lars Svensson has a very interesting challenge to the Neo-Fisherian view. (See link for slides.) 

What happens to inflation and unemployment when the central bank (for no good reason) raises the policy rate by 175 bp?...

Sweden did, which provides  

..a natural experiment of the neo-Fisherian view: Does inflation really increase after a policy-rate increase? 

Despite roughly the same circumstances as many other countries, including the US, Sweden in 2010 raised rates 175 bp. (Top left graph). The result: Inflation fell, the exchange rate appreciated. Unemployment also rose (not shown).  

1933 lessons for today

Nov 11, Eric Leeper presented "Recovery of 1933" with Margaret  Jacobson and  Bruce Preston, at the Hoover "Road Ahead for Central Banks" series, and it was my pleasure to discuss it. This is a really important and insightful paper.  

Since Japan hit the zero bound more than 25 years ago, economists have been thinking about how to avoid deflation. The answer seems obvious -- "helicopter money," or "unbacked fiscal expansion." But this has proved remarkably hard to do. Jacobson, Leeper and Preston show us how the Roosevelt Administration managed a credible unbacked fiscal expansion, and it bears important lessons today. 

Fifty shades of QE. Research in the bubble.

It always struck me that research inside the Fed seems to produce answers closer to the views of Fed officials than does research outside of the Fed. Perhaps my experience of reading a speech by Ben Bernanke one morning and attending a workshop by a Fed economist that found exactly his guess of the (implausibly large, to me) effects of QE that afternoon colored my views. 

In "Fifty Shades of QE:" Brian Fabo, Martina Jančoková, Elisabeth Kempf,  and Luboš Pástor quantify this tendency:

...central bank papers report larger effects of QE on output and inflation. Central bankers are also more likely to report significant effects of QE on output and to use more positive language in the abstract. Central bankers who report larger QE effects on output experience more favorable career outcomes. A survey of central banks reveals substantial involvement of bank management in research production.

Figure 5 gives some sense of the result:

Sowell review

Coleman Hughes writes a wonderful review of Thomas Sowell's life and work in City Journal. Savor it.

My first Sowell book was Knowledge and Decisions, and I am heartened to see Hughes put that foremost as well. Sowell takes up where Hayek left off, how the price system is the network like our neurons communicating information across a complex economy. This remains a verbal part of the economics tradition, resisting formal modeling so far, and is thereby too often glossed over in graduate training. Read it. 

Sowell of course has written masterpieces on race, a collection of impeccably documented uncomfortable truths to the progressive left. My first, The Economics and Politics of Race is just one of nearly a dozen meticulous books, from Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (1972) to Discrimination and Disparities, second edition (2019). Hughes reviews important points in Conquests and Cultures, Migrations and Cultures, and Race and Culture.

Great Society Review

I just finished Amity Shlaes' Great Society. It's a great book. I warmly recommend it.

The US is debating a fourth great wave of US government expansion. Theodore Roosevelt to Wilson the original progressive era and WWI; Frankin Roosevelt's new deal; and the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon "great society" of this book came before us.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, is in many ways the theme of the book. The Great Society offers lots of parallels to our time, and a cautionary tale that it will all end badly once again. But not all is the same, and the many ways our time is different from the 1960s is also good to ponder -- for better and for worse.

Amity is a gifted writer and storyteller. Pay attention to her books also for how they are written. How do you tell the story of an era in a way that is comprehensible and memorable? Amity picks a few central (and now often overlooked) people, a few programs, and a few benchmarks (the Dow, the price of gold), and tells the story of the era through their eyes. It's the Game of Thrones approach to the Great Society.  Do not expect even a comprehensive list of all great society programs, diff in diff regression discontinuity estimates of their causal effects, or even charts and graphs (all curiously packed in an appendix and never referred to in the text) or the customary eyeball-glazing recitations of statistics. This was her approach to the Great Depression in Forgotten Man, equally effective. It complements, but does not substitute for that more structural work.

Introduction

In case you don't get the point, Amity starts right off in the introduction with Michael Harrington who wrote "a then-famous bestseller called The Other America" and who worked for Sargent Shriver, which is one of the main characters of the book (Daenerys Targaryen?)

Why not socialism? The president had been in office three months, and he wanted new ideas to distinguish himself from his predecessor. Could the author bring up socialism at the lunch? The very word “socialism” had been toxic until recently. ... The taboo was weakening, though.

..“socialism” might sound too controversial for the White House. The writer could, however, pitch ideas that took the country toward socialism. ... Laws that backed up organized labor so it might represent a greater portion of the American workforce... Higher minimum wages... Minimum wages that covered more workers, even those who did not work in an office or full-time. A dramatic change in the training of bigoted policemen in the big cities. ... The money was simply in the wrong hands. ... a tax system that captured the elusive wealth of the superrich. The moment had come to level incomes in a systematic fashion. 

..The story sounds like something that could happen today."

The 1960s and early 1970s included a huge expansion of programs. And the results were in the end mostly abject failure.

Today

progressive proposals that bear a strong resemblance to Michael Harrington’s, from redistribution via taxation to student debt relief to a universal guaranteed income, are becoming popular again. Once again, many Americans rate socialism as the generous philosophy. But the results of our socialism were not generous. May this book serve as a cautionary tale of lovable people who, despite themselves, hurt those they loved. Nothing is new. It is just forgotten.

It is also a refreshing reminder of just how old most of the "new" ideas we are being bombarded from on the left are -- and a warning of how long they will pester us, at least as long as we are unwilling to learn.

From an SDS (students for democratic society) manifesto:

"The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock"

The capsule stories of the 1960s focus on the civil rights triumph, the remaining politically successul programs such as medicare and medicaid, the vietnam war, and a vague hippy nostalgia. Shales' story, and the central roles of the forgotten (largely)  men she tracks are a novel tonic.

Stories

Walter Reuther, head of United Auto Workers, is a central figure, and the fight between the old-left unions and the new-left students epitomized by Tom Hayden, for the soul of the Democratic party.

Sargent Shriver, and the Office of Economic Opportunity are the stand-in for many ill fated programs. It starts with the predictable story of chaos that results from a flood of federal money.   The flood of federal money  did not stop the cities from burning.  The OEO is the beginning of Federal support for "community action" programs, including political activity.

"Community action programs, the authors [of the Community Action Program Workbook—262 pages on how to apply for and run a federally funded program] wrote, should provide the “stimulation of change.” One marker of a successful community action group was that it “increased competence in protest activities.” The OEO ... welcomed experiments, including those where community action organizers paid by Washington were “facilitating the opportunities for the poor to participate in protest actions.”

That kind of language was enough to send mayors like Dick Daley through the roof.

In the end, the cities went up in flames. The OEO morphed in many ways. One interesting almost afterthought of the original program, legal aid to the poor -- who can obect to that, helping poor people who can't afford lawyers? -- ballooned the way all such programs do,

"the governor [Reagan] was after the lawyers again, assailing California Rural Legal Assistance. The nonprofit should have stuck to individual legal aid cases for rural indigents, Reagan said, but instead had “converted itself into a vehicle for class action lawsuits against various government agencies.” Reagan told the crowd that his staff had reckoned that if the CRLA won all its suits in California, the cost of welfare there would increase by $1 billion—the same amount Johnson and Shriver had first set as the budget for the entire War on Poverty."

Here was where the government started paying lawyers to sue the government for more government.

Amity tracks disastrous housing policies through the life of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, begun in earnest but remote social-planner hope, though destroying the community where it sat, and ending in controlled demolition.

"In some cases, only welfare families were entitled to the lowest rents at Pruitt-Igoe. And to receive welfare under Missouri’s rules, a family could have only one parent—the mother. So families considering life in the towers had to make a terrible choice: stay together or take the apartment. ..Families who moved into Pruitt-Igoe often lost a father. ...The social workers even policed apartments at night, checking to see if fathers had secretly returned, grounds for eviction. "

The consequences of which are predictable.

"Pruitt-Igoe elevators, which stopped only every few floors, were muggers’ traps. Poor maintenance meant the elevators often jammed, leaving gangs’ victims in with them for long extra minutes. The gangs lurked in the halls and made tenants “run the gantlet” to get to their doors. Young men threw bricks and rocks at windows and streetlamps; the activity was a regular sport..... Because there were no toilets on the ground floor, children had accidents there and in the elevators, and the elevators gradually became public toilets. The community area was a sorry joke... No one seemed able to stop the decay. "

I love this:

"Social scientists were descending on the complex to conduct multiyear investigations, and that irritated the tenants further."

we've been at it a long time, missing the ends of our noses.

"At Pruitt-Igoe, rents were scaled to income. Every time the Straughters’ wages went up, their rent went up, a tax on striving"

Income-capped rent subsidies are with us today.

"After tens of millions and decades of urban renewal spending, Detroit did not look renewed. Detroit looked, Mayor Cavanagh said, like a city that now did need a Marshall Plan, like “Berlin in 1945.” Almost three thousand businesses had been sacked, with damage many times greater than in Watts just two years before. "

In the end

"There was hypocrisy [and I would say a great deal of paternalistic disdain] in the  different treatment of the middle class and poor. For the middle class, the government had aimed to re-create and sustain the world of Alexis de Tocqueville, subsidizing home purchasers for suburban settlers. For the poor, however, the government had operated in the world of Karl Marx: government-sponsored housing blocks with tenants, not owners. Black citizens—Pruitt-Igoe was now all black—had been ripped from their roots when they moved North, uprooted again when they were moved for urban renewal, and then placed in high-rise rentals where putting down new roots was impossible."

"How might neighborhoods like this one have turned out if local companies, local authorities, and local individuals had led in the 1950s and 1960s, building their own Great Society? How might St. Louis have looked if the jobs had stayed? No one knew.  But here in the shadow of

Pruitt-Igoe, Father Shocklee and Pruitt-Igoe tenants had discovered one possibility. With his small housing program, Father Shocklee had shown that “the poor” were more like the middle class than people supposed. They gained from something only when they had a chance to own it."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a second central character in Amity's story (Tyrion Lannister?) Moynihan was a Democrat, but wrote the important and controversial "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action," pointing out, among many other things, the perverse incentives of welfare.

"From his work at Harvard and in Washington, Moynihan thought he had learned what was wrong with American welfare. The first trouble was that poverty funding tended to flow to bureaucrats—social workers, not poor people. “Feeding the horses to feed the sparrows,” Moynihan called it.  In many states, those social workers spent their time in perverse endeavors: inspecting apartments at Pruitt-Igoe to make sure no fathers were present, for example. Taxes hit people when they entered the workforce, reducing the appeal of working just as Eartha Kitt said. ...In some states, for example, a welfare mother working at the same job as a family father not on welfare took in 50 percent more than the man, because she was entitled to keep a portion of her welfare. Why not bypass the bureaucrats and send the money to families, regardless of whether fathers were present?"

And then he took a job with Nixon, and became one of Nixon's main advisers. He nearly got passed a negative income tax, the equivalent of today's universal basic income. In his grudging New York Times review, Binyamin Applebaum finds this story "curious," because it did not pass in the end. But it nearly did, which makes it important. Amity covers well the failed attempt to over rule right to work laws, which also nearly passed. Near failures good and bad are equally instructive to our current situation, no matter the flap of butterfly wings that determines their fate.  (The quick review of the UK's longer experience starting p. 335 is well worth it too.)

I found this amusing

"The crowd at Harvard had held even Hubert Humphrey, and at times Robert Kennedy, in contempt. Any interest in Nixon Harvard rated worse than reprehensible

The schoolmates of Moynihan’s children stopped talking to them. Alan Rabinowitz, a fellow academic, wrote a satirical poem chiding Moynihan for his betrayal, “The Knight Before Nixon.”

Plus ça change in academia, and much Trump-deranged society.

Fairchild semiconductor plays a small but significant role. It's good to remember how different the US economy of the 1950s was. There really were a few very large companies in most industries, and most technology came out of defense. The emergence of an innovative private tech sector is one of those many ways we are not replaying exactly the same song. The slow emergence of Toyota and VW, selling better cars and forcing change in Detroit is another.

Money and gold

A minor story for the book caught my eye, and I pass it on first as many blog readers are interested in monetary issues. One of the themes of the book --  the snow level on the great white wall -- is the price of gold, and the US continuing problems of gold outflow, the emergence of inflation, and the eventual collapse of the Bretton Woods system. This is an event much too little studied by macroeconomists, though my international and economic history friends tell me that shows just how parochial we are and we should start reading their papers.

In macroeconomics perhaps we are too influenced by Milton Friedman's great called home run, the 1968 presidential address, where he forecast inflation would emerge along with unemployment. But Friedman's story was told entirely in terms of the money supply and to a lesser extent interest rate targets, the one too large and the other too low. And that is how the stylized history has come down to us: Fiscal deficits from the Great Society and Vietnam war, combined with too loose monetary policy, set off inflation.

That story leads to the puzzle of our age: If the (by current standards) comparatively minor Johnson-Nixon deficits set off a grand inflation why do our huge deficits have no such effect now, despite many officials stated desire for more inflation?

The story of the book reminds us that the mechanics were quite different then, and leads me to the speculative thought that the gold standard mechanism brought on inflation much more quickly than our current arrangements. In part, it may have been designed to do so -- to force governments to make fiscal adjustments quickly rather than let the problem get so big the fiscal adjustment will be immense, much as Doug Diamond and Raghu Rajan model short term debt and its runs as a disciplining device to managers.

The world was different then. We had fixed exchange rates, and it was difficult to move capital from country to country -- to buy foreign stocks, for example. Bretton Woods was not really set up to handle today's large trade deficits financed by large capital account surpluses. When the US started running trade deficits, other countries piled up dollars, and the main thing they could do with those dollars was to turn them in to their central banks, who in turn used them to drain gold from the Fed. So, it strikes me that open capital markets that allow us to finance large trade deficits are an important reason our system has held up so long.

Amity tells the sad tale of stopgap measures -- bans on using dollars for foreign travel, half-hearted interest rate increases, looney schemes for the Federal Government to mine gold, and of course the tragedy of price controls.

In any case, the remaining gold standard between central banks, not very open capital markets, not very open currency markets and fixed exchange rates were a crucial part of the inflation dynamics in this period, not just bad money supply or interest rate rules.

The episode also raises the counterfactual question why the US did not use the many devices used to defend the gold standard through the centuries. Borrow gold. Temporarily suspend convertibility.

Coda

At the end of a review that had to be negative, though he had to admit the quality of the book, New York Times review, Binyamin Applebaum writes

"Half a century later, in the midst of a revival of interest in ideas like Moynihan’s basic income proposal, readers may find themselves wondering whether the nation’s problem is really too much government — or, perhaps, not enough."

One wonders just what it would take to ever change his mind on that one. Were the 60s riots, the 70s economy, and the evident pathologies of the welfare system not bad enough, or do we have to go full Venezuela first? After all these years, and with the same policies on agenda, with the same predictable disincentives and unintended consequences, could not his call be at least for smarter government, not just more? For a larger government that learns from rather than repeats this sad history?

Wealth and taxes, part I

(This is Part I of a series. See the overview for a summary. The punchline comes in Part V.)

Last November I had the pleasure of discussing "Top Wealth in the United States: New Estimates and Implications for Taxing the Rich" a very nice paper by Matthew Smith, Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick at the NBER asset pricing meetings, presented by Eric. The paper prompts a series of blog posts on wealth distribution and wealth taxes. I'll try to stick to points that haven't been made a hundred times already.

The paper mostly examines  Saez and Zucman's 2016 QJE paper on wealth inequality.  As many others have found, the Saez Zucman numbers are, ... let's say somewhat overstated.

Their bottom line is to cut Saez and Zucman in half. As I read the paper I think this is conservative -- and when we ask the obvious questions that the whole enterprise begs to be asked (which Smith et al don't do, but I will) a chasm of emptiness opens up, and the questions end up emptier than their answers.

The first thing you have to understand is the nature of wealth. Here is most people's impression of what wealth is:

That's not it at all. As Zwick et al say,

“Less than half of top wealth takes the form of liquid securities with clear market values”

So, the question is how do we measure the "wealth" that is not liquid securities with clear market values, like the profits of privately owned businesses? And, given that there is not US data on wealth (yet, thank goodness), even the part that is a security is hard to measure. 

Enter "capitalization." The main idea in Saez and Zucman, reexamined by Smith et al., is that we measure "wealth" by measuring income, and then translating that income to wealth by assuming it will last forever and discounting it at some rate. In equations 

Wealth = Income / discount rate

We have data from the IRS on income. So, let's follow along on Zwick et al.'s best story, how we find wealth invested in bonds from IRS individual interest income data and total bonds outstanding data: 

“In 2014, the aggregate flow of [taxable] interest income was $98B, and the stock of fixed income wealth was $11T. The ratio gives the average yield, r = $98B/$11T   = 0.89%. Using this yield to capitalize income amounts to multiplying every dollar of interest income by 1/0.89% = 113 to estimate fixed income wealth. … Implementing equation (4) for fixed income gives an estimate of top fixed income wealth of $42B × 113 = $4.7T of fixed income wealth held by the top 0.1%. The bottom 99.9% estimate is $56B × 113 = $6.4T .

My emphasis.

You may have wondered, if we're just going to mulitply income by a number and call it wealth, why are we bothering to measure the wealth distribution at all? Let's just use the income distribution! You get one answer here -- if you call it wealth you get to multiply by 113! Since only some kinds of income get this treatment, kinds that are more likely to be held by wealthy people, that makes the numbers look much more unequal.

Smith et al's point though is not this basic one. Rather they look carefully at the calculation. This calculation assumes that all "fixed income" assets pay the same, low, rate of interest. Another well established fact is that rich people get better rates of return on their assets.

 Here is Smith et al's plot of the actual rate of return that people earn on their fixed income investments. The uber wealthy earn 6% on their fixed income investments. This is not a small effect. In our capitalization factors, wealth = income / discount rate,

1/0.01 = 100

1/0.06 = 16.7

Changing from a 0.01 discount rate to a 0.06 discount rate pulls the wealth estimate per dollar of income down from 100 to 16.7. That's a lot. Smith et al:

“the adjustment reduces the top capitalization factor—and thus estimated top fixed income wealth—by a factor of 4.7, or 80%”

This is huge, to say the least.

(Note the irony. People who worry about wealth inequality are usually bemoan the fact that rich people earn higher returns on average than not so rich people, as it apparently will make inequality worse over time.  But the same higher average return must mean a lower multiples for converting income to wealth. You just can't have it both ways.

Higher returns are not some evil plot. The largely come from the fact that rich people buy riskier assets, like stocks and  junk bonds, and less rich people buy safer but lower yielding assets like bank accounts.  OK, It is to some extent a plot. Lots of regulations prohibit lower income people from buying the kinds of assets that make rich people richer in the name of consumer protection. The SEC is loosening some of these regulations.)

Beyond fixed income, the capitalization game gets even muddier, in both papers. What income flow are you going to capitalize?

“In the case of C-corporation equities, the income flow is dividends plus [realized] capital gains."

I think that's an accounting mistake, common in this literature. You cannot take the realized capital gains as an "income" flow for capitalization purposes. Suppose you buy a stock for $1, and it grows to $100. You sell $10 of the stock, but now you only have $90 left. You can't keep doing this forever, as the capitalization assumes.  That's fundamentally different than the company is worth $100, makes a $10 profit and gives you a $10 dividend. I'll be curious to hear from better accountants than I whether you can sensibly capitalize realized capital gains. Onwards...

For S-corporation equities, the income flow is S-corporation  income. For proprietor and partnership wealth, the income flow is the sum of proprietor income and partnership income  [ “capital” income?].  In the  case of real estate, property tax is capitalized to estimate housing assets ….”

Ok, that's income, what is the discount rate?

“Private business returns are harder to estimate than fixed income returns because private business wealth is harder to observe than fixed income wealth…We focus on multiple-based valuation models”

So we go from multiples to estimate a multiple... This all seems rather circular.

The bottom line? The game, as announced by Saez and Zucman is this: We start with the  pretax value of “capital” income, including asset income, proprietor income and partnership income, but not labor income (wages, bonuses, etc) or social security income. We multiply by various huge 1/r numbers to call them "wealth".  By doing that and using low r numbers, the "wealth" distribution looks much more extreme than the income distribution. As you can see the 1/r assumption allows great latitude in how this calculation is going to come out.

****

I spent a lot of time in asset pricing, and this paper was presented at an asset pricing meeting, so let me offer a little bit of what asset pricing has to say about these kinds of procedures.

The real capitalization formula is

P/D = 1/(r-g)

the price - dividend ratio is equal to one over the difference of the discount rate and the growth rate of dividends. Shhh! If the wealth inequality crowd realizes they can subtract g their multipliers will explode! (Joke. Of course we always use the right numbers) 

The function 1/(r-g) is very sensitive to r and g, especially for low discount rates like the 1% we were using for bonds. Going down from 2% to 1% doubles the value. So, if you want to fiddle with values, fiddle with discount rates.

The right discount rate is much higher for risky assets than risk free assets. Lots of people discount things with stock market risk using interest rates, and get absurdly too high values.

If you put the 20 best financial economists in the world together in a room, gave them all of a company's cash flow information, they could not come within a factor of 3 of the actual stock market value.  "Valuation" mostly consists of fiddling with discount rates to get the "right" answer. Maybe "multiples" isn't so bad after all.

In short, capitalizing income to get any sense of "wealth" is an inherently... absurdly imprecise game.

***

I don't mean to sound critical of Smith et al. They're doing the best they can given the Zucman and Saez rules of the game. But a little peek into this sausage factory should leave you wondering, just why are these the rules of the game? Why do we care (should we care) so much about the distribution of something that is essentially impossible to measure or define? If you are making money was a partner in an LLC you help to run, why should anyone care about a fictitious accounting "value" of that partnership? You can't sell it!

Why start with pretax income? If you pay half your income in taxes, does that not halve the value of the asset?  Why does "wealth" include the value of proprietor and partnership income but not labor income or social security income?

These are good questions for the next few blog posts. Stay tuned.

On to Part II

Cost divergence

Source: Marginal Revolution

This lovely picture is from Why are the prices so D*mn High? by Eric Helland and Alex Tabarrok. (It's covered in Marginal Revolution: The Initial post,  Bloat does not explain the rising cost of education, and an upcoming summary on health care.)

Bottom line: objects got cheap, people got expensive. Technology, automation, globalization (thank you China), and quality improvement made goods cheaper. People, especially skilled people, got more expensive. All of which should make you feel good if you're a person and especially a skilled person.

The source of the relative rise in the cost of education and health care is less clear. Looking around at  a typical university,  school system, or hospital suggests massive bloat and inefficiency. Alex suggests  not:

I assumed that regulation, bloat and bureaucracy, monopoly power and the Baumol effect would each explain some of what is going on. After looking at this in depth, however, my conclusion is that it’s almost all Baumol effect. 

Clemens on minimum wage

Jeff Clemens offers a "roadmap for navigating recent research" on minimum wages in a nice CATO policy analysis.  A review and a doubt.

He discusses the recent claims that minimum wages don't hurt low-skilled people. This is an impressive and readable account of a vast literature. It's not as easy as it seems to evaluate cause and effect in economics.  Evidence from small increases in the minimum wage over short time intervals in some locations in good economic times may not tell you the effects of large increases over longer time intervals in all locations in bad economic times.

The "new conventional wisdom," of small effects, Jeff reports, ignores a lot of the more recent work, and especially work that  uses "data from individual-level administrative records" rather than "aggregate data and survey data," work that runs "experiments whenever possible," and work that "transparently analyzes compact historical episodes in the U.S. experience" (P. 8)

Concentration increasing?

Is the US economy getting more concentrated or less? At the aggregate level, more. This is a widely noted fact, leading quickly to calls for more active government moves to break up big companies.

But at the local level, no. Diverging Trends in National and Local Concentration by  Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Nicholas Trachter documents the trend.

They make a concentration measure that is basically the sum of squared market shares, so up means more concentrated and down means less concentrated. This is the average of many different industries and markets.

The average concentration of national markets has gone up. But the concentration of smaller and smaller markets has gone down. More businesses are dividing up county and zip code markets.

Industries differ. This graph does not get a prize for ease of distinguishing the lines, but the two red lines just below zero are manufacturing and wholesale trade, where the industries with really dramatic reductions in local concentration are retail trade, finance insurance and real estate, and services.

What's going on? The natural implication is that the town once had 3 local restaurants, two local banks, and 3 stores. Now it has a McDonalds, a Burger King, a Denny's and an Applebees; a branch of Chase, B of A, and Wells Fargo, and a Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Costco. National brands replace local stores, increasing the number of local stores.

However, that turns out not to be so obvious.

This graph shows what happens in the diverging industries (those in which national goes up, and local goes down) if you leave out the biggest company. Doing so, lowers the rise of national concentration, because we left out the single most concentrated firm. The lower line however, shows a positive effect. If we leave out the largest national firm, the local markets look more concentrated. If  national brands had just replaced local businesses, then when we leave them out, we should see lots of smaller shares.  The same thing happens if we leave out the second and third largest.

What's going on? Well, they look at what happens when Wal-Mart comes to town.

The lower line is the effect on concentration in the years before and after the top national firm enters a market. Concentration drops. If, when Wal-Mart came to town, all the exiting firms went under, concentration would rise. The upper line shows you concentration ignoring the largest enterprise. It's unchanged. Either the mom and pop stores do, in fact, stay in business; or new smaller firms enter along with Wal-Mart. The phenomenon is not just the replacement of all smaller businesses by a larger number of national chains.

The paper was presented at the San Francisco Fed "Macroeconomics and Monetary Policy" conference, where I am today. The discussions, by Huiyu Li and François Gourio, were excellent. As with all micro data there is a lot to quibble with. Is a zip code really a market? Much of the data are industry+zip codes with a single firm, both before and (slightly less often) after. Maybe Walmart and other stores drag in customers from other places? And of course, concentration is not the same thing as competition. The SF Fed will, in a week or so, post the conference, papers, and discussions.

Shorter Papers

Ben Leubsdorf at the WSJ does a great job of covering the discussion within economics over too-long papers, picky editing and refereeing, and other issues.

Defensive writing is certainly part of the issue

“If you want to publish a paper in a top journal, even if you think you have one key insight that can be conveyed succinctly, the referees are not going to take it,” Ms. Finkelstein said.

I think Amy would want to clarify this means referees at other journals. Editors are also to blame. We must remember, referees do not take or reject papers, referees advise editors, and it is always the editor's job to make publication decisions.

From an early stage of an academic career, “it becomes pretty clear that you need to check off a pretty long list of items to really convince people that the way you’re interpreting your results is indeed the right way to do it,” Mr. Bazzi said.

..... When you’re trying to anticipate possible criticisms on a controversial topic like the minimum wage, and situate your research in the deep existing literature on the subject, it “quickly adds up to a long paper,” said University of Massachusetts-Amherst economist Arindrajit Dube,....

Mr. Dube said that paper is now in the process of being revised ahead of publication—including acting on a request to make it shorter.

However, journals don't encourage length, and there is some sense to the current equilibrium.  You write a paper with lots of defensive "what if this what if that." You send it to journals. My typical paper is rejected at 2-3 journals, so by the time it's published I have 6 to 12 reports.  My referees are typically thoughtful and diligent, and the paper grows in addressing all of their what-abouts too. Since I haven't been doing detailed empirical work lately, the requests are not nearly as extensive as those authors receive. Then we finally arrive at publication, and the editor says "now cut it down to 40 pages. You can stuff all that into an internet appendix if you like." Which nobody reads.

This isn't necessarily a bad equilibrium.

Nobel Symposium on Money and Banking Day 2

Day 2 of the Nobel Symposium on Money and Banking focused on monetary policy. (My last post covered Day 1 on banking.)

Bernanke

Sadly Ben Bernanke's video and slides are not up on the website. Ben showed some very interesting evidence that the crisis was an unpredictable run, rather than the usual story about predictable defaults resulting from too much credit. Things really did get suddenly a lot worse in September and October 2008. Yes, it's easy to say this is defense against the charge that he should have done more ahead of time. But evidence is evidence, and I find it quite plausible that the relatively small losses in subprime need not have caused such a massive crisis and recession absent a run. Ben says the material is part of a paper he will release soon, so look for it. One can understand that Bernanke is careful about releasing less than perfect drafts of papers and videos.

History

Barry Eichengreen gave a scholarly account of why history matters, especially the great depression, and we should pay more attention to it. (Paper, video.) He aimed squarely at typical economists whose knowledge stopped at Friedman and Schwartz, or perhaps Ben Bernanke's famous non-monetary channels paper, in which bank failures propagated the depression. He emphasized the role of the gold standard and international cooperation or non-cooperation, and warned against facile comparisons of the gold standard experience to today's events and the euro in particular.

Randy Kroszner has a great set of slides and an engaging presentation. He also started on parallels with the great depression, and told well the story of the US default on gold clauses. He closed with a warning about fighting the last war -- particularly apt given the exclusive focus of most of this conference on the events of 2008 -- and on how to start a crisis. In his view when Bank of England Gov Mervyn King said: “We will support Northern Rock." People hear "Northern Rock's in trouble? Run!" Likewise, in my view, speeches by President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson did a lot to spark the run in the US.

DSGE

A highlight for me, was the session on DSGE models.

Marty Eichenbaum (video, slides, subsequent paper) gave a nice review of the current status of new Keynesian DSGE models, and how they are developing in reaction to the financial crisis and recession, and the zero bound episode.

Harald Uhlig

Critiques, or more precisely lists of outstanding puzzles and challenges, are often more memorable and novel than positive summaries, and Harald Uhlig delivered a clear and memorable one. (Video, Slides)

Asset prices are a longstanding problem in DSGE models. In typical linearized form, the quantity dynamics are governed by intertemporal substitution, and the asset prices by risk aversion, and neither has much influence on the other. (I learned this from Tom Tallarini.) Rather obviously, our recent recession was all about risk aversion -- people stopped consuming and investing, and tried to move from private to government bonds because they were scared to death, not a sudden attack of thriftiness. There is a lot of current work going on to try to repair this deficiency, but it still lives in the land of extensions of the model rather than the mainstream. Harald also points out a frequently ignored implication of Epstein-Zin utility, the utility index reflects all consumption and anything that enters utility

Financial frictions are blossoming in DSGE models, in two forms: First, HANK or "heterogenous agent" models, which add things like borrowing constraints and uninsurable risks so that the distribution of income matters, and in an eternal quest to make the models work more like static ISLM. Second, in response to the financial crisis (see first day!) stylized models of banking and intermediary finance are showing up. I'm still a little puzzled that the more standard time-varying risk aversion part of macro-finance got ignored, (a plea here) but that is indeed what's going on.

The conundrum, here as elsewhere in DSGE, is that the more people play with the models, the further they get from their founding philosophy: macro models that do talk about monetary policy, (now) financial crises, but that obey the Lucas rules: Optimization, budget constraints, markets, or, more deeply, structures that have some hope of being policy invariant and therefore predictions that will survive the Lucas critique. Already, many ingredients such as Calvo pricing are convenient parables, but questionably realistic as policy-invariant.

Harald points out that since most of the frictions are imposed in a rather ad-hoc manner, neither will they be policy-invariant. This is a deeper and more realistic point than commonly realized. Every time market participants hit a "friction," they tend to innovate a way around that friction so it doesn't hurt them next time. Regulation Q on interest rates was once a "friction," and then the money market fund was invented. The result is too often "chicken papers:"

The understandable trouble is, if you try to microfound every single friction from Deep Theory -- just why it is that credit card companies put a limit on how much you can borrow, in terms of asymmetric information, moral hazard, and so forth -- the audience will be asleep long before you get to the data. Also, as we saw in day 1, there is (to put it charitably) a lot of uncertainty in just how contract or banking theory maps to actual frictions. I think we're stuck with ad-hoc frictions, if you want to go that route.

Harald's next point is, I think, his most devastating, as it describes a huge hole in current models that is not (unlike the last two) a point of immense current research effort. The Phillips curve and inflation are the central point of the New Keynesian DSGE model -- and a disaster. 

The Phillips curve is central. The point of the model is for monetary policy to have output effects. Money itself has (rightly) disappeared in the model, so the only channel for monetary policy to work is via the Phillips curve. Interest rates change inflation, and inflation causes output changes. No surprise, it is very hard for that model to produce anything like the last recession out of small changes in inflation. (I have to agree here with the premise of the financial frictions view -- if you want your model to produce the last recession, other than by one huge shock, the model needs something like a financial crisis.)

The Phillips curve in the data is well known

Less well known, but worth lots of attention, is how the now standard DSGE models completely fail to capture inflation. Harald's slide:

The point of the slide, in simpler form: The standard Phillips curve is

inflation today = beta x expected inflation next year + kappa x output gap  + shock

Essentially all inflation is accounted for by the shock. The model is basically silent about the source of inflation. Looking at the model as a whole, not just one equation, Neither monetary policy shocks nor changes in rules accounts for any significant amount of inflation. 

I made a similar graph recently. Use the standard three equation model

Now, use actual data on output y, inflation pi, and interest rate i, to back out the shocks v. Turn off the monetary policy shock vi = 0. Solve the model and plot the data -- what would have happened if the Fed had exactly followed the Taylor rule? 

Answer: Inflation and output would have been virtually the same. The inflation of the 1970s and its conquest in the 1980s had nothing to do with monetary policy mistakes. It is entirely the fault, and then fortunate consequence, of "marginal cost" shocks that come from out of the model. This is a pretty uncomfortable prediction of a model designed to be about monetary policy! Or, as Harald put it

• Data: no Phillips-Curve tradeoff.
• QDSGE: don’t account for inflation with monetary policy shocks.
• The NK / Phillips-Curve-based NK QDSGE models may thus provide a poor guide for monetary policy.

Wait, you ask, what about Marty Eichenbaum's pretty graphs, such as this one, showing the effects of a monetary policy shock?

The answer: After a lot of work, the effects of a monetary policy shock look (at last) about like what Milton Friedman said they should look like in 1968. But monetary policy shocks don't account for any but a tiny part of output and inflation variation, quite contra Friedman (and Taylor, and many others') view.

Last, standard new Keyensian DSGE models have strong "Fisherian" properties. In response to long lasting or expected interest rate rises, inflation goes up. More on this later.

Ellen McGrattan

Ellen stole the show. (Slides.) Take a break, and watch the video. She manages to be hilarious and incisive. And unlike the rest of us, she didn't try to sheohorn a two hour lecture into her 15 minutes.

Her central points. First, like Harald, she points out that the models are driven by large shocks with less and less plausible structural interpretation, and thus further from the Lucas critique solution than once appeared to be the case. The shocks are really "wedges," deviations from equilibrium conditions of the model with unknown sources

What to do? Focus on rules and institutions. This is a deep point. Even DSGE modelers, in the desire to speak to policy makers, often adopt the static ISLM presumption that policy is about actions, about decisions, whether to raise or lower the funds rate. The other big Lucas point is that we should think about policy in terms of rules and institutions, not just actions.

Monetary policy and ELB

Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé (slides, video)  talked about the Fisherian possibility -- that raising interest rates raises inflation. New-Keynesian DSGE models, with rational expectations, have this property, especially for permanent or preannounced interest rate increases, and when at zero interest rates or otherwise in a passive regime where interest rates do not react more than one for one with inflation. She and Martin Uribe have been advocating this possibility as a serious proposal for Europe and Japan that want to raise inflation.

She presented some nice evidence that permanent increases in interest rates do increase inflation -- and right away, not just in the long run.

Mike Woodford. (slides, video)  gave a dense talk (37 slides, 20 minutes) on policy at the lower bound. During the ELB, central banks moved from interest rates to asset purchases and forward guidance. Mike asks,

To what extent does this mean that the entire conceptual framework of monetary stabilization policy needs to be reconsidered, for a world in which ELB might well continue periodically to bind? 

In classic form, Mike sets the question up as a Ramsey problem. Given a DSGE model, what is the optimal policy, given that interest rates are occasionally constrained? He derives from that problem a price level target. The price level target works, intuitively, by committing the central bank to a period of extra inflation after the zero bound ends. It is a popular form of forward guidance. The innovation here is to derive that formally as an optimal policy problem.

Mike's price level target is stochastic, changing optimally over time to respond to shocks. I'm a little skeptical that the central bank can observe and understand such shocks, especially given the above Uhlig-McGrattan discussion about the nature of shocks. Also, as I emphasize in comments, I'm dubious about the great power of promises of what the central bank will do in the far future to stimulate output today. I'm a fan of price level targets, but on both sides, not just as stimulus, but for utterly different reasons.

Mike takes on rather skeptically the common alternative -- quantitative easing, asset purchases during the time of the bound. He points out that to work, people have to believe that the increase in money is permanent, and won't be quickly withdrawn when the zero bound is over. As evidence, he points to Japan:

Similarly, he likes the price level target over forward guidance -- speeches in place of action -- as it is a more credible commitment to do things ex-post that the bank may not wish to do ex-post.

Finally, he addresses the puzzles of new Keynesian models at the zero bound -- forward guidance has stronger effects the further in the future is the promise; effects get larger as prices get less sticky, and so on. He argues that models should replace rational expectations with a complex k-step iterated expectations rule.

Me.

Video, slides from Sweden, slides from my webpage, written version. I covered this in a previous blog post, so won't repeat it all. I put a lot of effort in to it, and it summarizes a lot of what I've been doing in 15 minutes flat, so I recommend it (of course). It also offers more perspective on above points by Mike and Stephanie. My favorite line, referring to Mike's push for irrational expectations is something close to

"I never thought we would come to Sweden, that I would be defending the basic new-Keynesian program, and that Mike Woodford would be trying to tear it down. Yet here we are. Promote the fiscal equation from the footnotes and you can save the rest." 

Emi Nakamura

Poor Emi had to go last in an exhausting conference of jet-lagged participants. She did a great job (video, slides) covering a century of monetary history and monetary ideas clearly and transparently. These are great slides to use for an undergraduate or MBA class on monetary policy, as well. An abbreviated list:

• Gold standard
• Seasonal variation in interest rates under the gold standard; money demand shocks
• Money demand shocks in the 1980s -- how the supposedly "stable" V in MV=PY fell apart when the Fed pushed on M.
  
  
  
• Theoretical instability / indeterminacy of interest rate targets
• The switch to interest rate targets and corridors in operating procedures
• The (near-miraculous) success of inflation targets
  
• Taylor rules and other theory of determinate inflation under interest rate targets
• How is it "monetary economics" without money?
• Why did immense QE not cause inflation? 

The overarching theme is the grand story of a move, intellectual and practical, from money supply targets (of which gold is one) to interest rate targets.

Postlude

Monday featured two panels, Macroeconomic research and the financial crisis: A critical assessment, with Annette Vissing-Jørgensen, Luigi Zingales, Nancy Stokey, and  Robert Barro ; and Banking and finance research and the financial crisis: A critical assessment with Kristin Forbes, Ricardo Reis, Amir Sufi, and Antoinette Schoar.

Perhaps it's in the nature of panels, but I found these a disappointment, especially compared to the stellar presentations in the main conference. Also I think it would have been better to allow more (any, really) audience questions; the whole conference was a bit disappointing for lack of general discussion, especially with such a stellar group.

In particular, Luigi led by excoriating the profession for not paying attention to housing problems and financial crises. I thought this a bit unfair and simultaneously short-sighted. He singled out monetary economics textbooks, including Mike Woodford's, for omitting financial crises. Well, Mike omitted asteroid impacts too. It isn't a book about financial crises. And, after lamabasting all of us, he said not one word about events since 2009. What are we missing now? I had to stand up and ask that rude question, again suggesting that perhaps we are all not listening to Ken Rogoff this time. Annette went on to ask something like "don't you Chicago people believe in any regulation at all," and the respondents were too polite to say what an unproductive question that is and just move on.

Again, I offer apologies to authors and discussants I didn't get to. The whole thing was memorable, but there is only so much I can blog! Do go to the site and look at the other sessions, according to your interests.