Nobel Symposium on Money and Banking Day 1

I attended the Nobel Symposium on Money and Banking in May, hosted by the Swedish House of Finance and Stockholm School of Economics.   It was a very interesting event. Follow the link for all the presentations and videos. (Click on "program." )

This review is  idiosyncratic, focusing on presentations that blog readers might find interesting. My apologies to authors I leave out or treat briefly -- all the presentations were action-packed and even my verbose blogging style can't cover everything.

"Nobel" in the title has a great convening power! The list of famous economists attending is impressive. And each presenter put great effort into explaining what they were doing, in part on wise invitation from the organizers to keep it accessible.  As a result I  understood far more than I do from usual 20 minute conference presentations and 15 minute discussions.

The first day was really "banking day," giving a whirlwind tour of the financial economics of banking.

Trading liquidity

Darrell Duffie gave (as always) a super presentation on the effects regulation is having on arbitrage in markets. (Slides, video)

Loss Aversion

A frequent email correspondent asked "I’d love to hear your take on “loss aversion.” I just finished listening to Kahneman’s book." My response seems worth sharing with blog readers.

Expected Utility

Let’s review expected utility first. The utility you get from consumption or wealth is a concave function of consumption or wealth. An extra dollar makes you more happy than it makes Bill Gates. So, compare either getting C for sure, or a 50/50 bet of getting C+Delta or C-Delta, i.e. having C or betting 50/50 on a coin flip. The expected utility of C for sure is just U(C). The expected utility of the bet is

EU = prob(loss) * U(consumption if loss) + prob(gain) * U(consumption if gain)

EU = 1/2 * U(C - Delta) + 1/2 * U(C + Delta).

As the graph shows, this is less than the expected utility of C for sure. So, people should decline fair value bets. They are “risk averse”.

Comments. Behavioral fans (New York times has done this often in its economics coverage) criticize “classical economics” by saying it ignores the fact that people fear losses more than they value gains. That’s absolutely false. Look at the utility function. People fear losses more than they value gains. That’s the whole point of expected utility. (You’ll see the confusion in a second).

A common mistake: EU( C) is not the same as U [ E(C )]. You do not find the utility of expected consumption, you find the expected utility of consumption. In my graph, C is equal to the expected value of C-Delta and C+Delta, and the whole point is that the utility of C is bigger than the expected utility of (C-Delta) or (C+Delta). You can take E inside a linear function, but you cannot take E inside a nonlinear function.

Loss aversion

OK, on to loss aversion. In the usual sort of experiments Kahneman found that people seem reluctant to lose money. They have a “reference point” and work  hard to avoid bets that might put them below that reference point. He models that as expected utility with a kink in it, as in the second drawing.

I was careful to draw the reference point as different than C. People do not necessarily place the reference point at the expected value of the bet. In fact, usually they don’t. If betting on stocks, the expected value of the bet is to gain 7% per year. The “don’t lose money” point would be do not go below 0, not do not go below the mean. Here people are especially afraid only of the very left part of the distribution.

Now, really, how are these models different? Expected utility can be any function, and nobody said it doesn’t have a kink in it. The key distinguishing feature of loss aversion – and its Achilles heel – is that the reference point shifts around. If you make some money, and play again, then your kink shifts up to the new amount of money you made. Expected utility is supposed to stay the same function of consumption or wealth. People might change behavior – most likely the utility curve is flatter at high levels of consumption, so rich people are less risk averse. But the curve itself does not shift. The key assumption that distinguishes loss aversion from expected utility is that the kink point shifts around as you gain and lose money.

That’s also the Achilles heel.  The first problem is how do you handle sequential bets. If I go to the casino, and know I will play twice, how do I think about my strategy? With expected utility this is easy, because the expected utility works backwards. Suppose you win the first bet, then figure out what you do in the second bet. For each of win or loss in the first bet, then, you have an expected utility from taking the second bet. The expected utility of the first bet is then the expected vaule of the expected utilities you would have if you won or lost.

Q is better than you think

This lovely graph comes from "Learning and the Improving Relationship Between Investment and q" by Daniel Andrei, William Mann, and Nathalie Moyen. The careful investment and q measurement make it much better than similar figures I've made for example Figure 4 here. Their paper explores the puzzle, just why did q theory work worse before 1995?

The graph also bears on the "monopoly" debate. Corporations are making huge profits, stocks are high, yet we don't see investment, the story goes -- marginal q must be much less than average q, indicating some sort of fixed factor or rent. Not in the graph.

The High Cost of Good Intentions

The High Cost of Good Intentions is a superb new book by my Hoover colleague John Cogan. It is a political and budgetary history of U.S. Federal entitlement programs. It is full of lessons for just why the programs have expanded inexorably over time, and just how hard it will be for our political system to reform them.

If indeed the Congress will now turn to entitlement reform, as house speaker Paul Ryan has promised, this will be the book to have on your desk. (Ryan already blurbed it (back cover) as did Bill Bradley, Sam Nunn, George Shultz and Alan Greenspan.)

If you think entitlement programs, and the political hash that enacts them, are recent problems, or the fault of one political party, think again. John's main lesson is that the emergence of bloated entitlements is a hardy feature of our (and many other countries') democracies.  He does this by just reading the history.

The habit of expanding entitlements started early. Chapter 2:

Revolutionary War pensions were the nation's first entitlement program. ... between 1789 and 1793, the federal government agreed to pay annual pensions to Continental Army soldiers and seamen who became disabled as a result of wartime injuries or illness. [later, as an inducement to service]... 

For forty years, Congress enlarged and expnaded these benefits until, by the 1830s, they covered virtually all Revolutionary War seamen and soldiers, including volunteers and members of the state militia and their widows, regardless of disability or income. 

That costs might balloon beyond forecasts was not a total surprise

A Behavioral new-Keynesian Model

Here are comments on Xavier Gabaix' "A Behavioral new-Keynesian model." Xavier presented at the October 21 NBER Economic Fluctuations and growth meeting, and I was the discussant. Slides here

Short summary: It's a really important paper. I think it's too important to be true.

Gabaix' irrationality fixes the pathologies of the standard model by making a stable model unstable, and hence locally determinate. Gabaix' irrationality parameter M in [0,1] can thus substitute for the usual Taylor principle that interest rates move more than one for one with inflation.

Macro-Finance

A new essay "Macro-Finance," based on a talk I gave at the University of Melbourne this Spring. I survey many current frameworks including habits, long run risks, idiosyncratic risks, heterogenous preferences, rare disasters, probability mistakes, and debt or institutional finance. I show how all these approaches produce quite similar results and mechanisms: the market's ability to bear risk varies over time, with business cycles. I speculate with some simple models that time-varying risk premiums can produce a theory of risk-averse recessions, produced by varying risk aversion and precautionary saving, rather than Keynesian flow constraints or new-Keynesian intertemporal substitution.

Update 11/30/2020. The link now works and points to the published article 

NYT on zoning

Conor Dougherty in The New York Times has a good article on zoning laws,

a growing body of economic literature suggests that anti-growth sentiment... is a major factor in creating a stagnant and less equal American economy.

...Unlike past decades, when people of different socioeconomic backgrounds tended to move to similar areas, today, less-skilled workers often go where jobs are scarcer but housing is cheap, instead of heading to places with the most promising job opportunities  according to research by Daniel Shoag, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and Peter Ganong, also of Harvard.

One reason they’re not migrating to places with better job prospects is that rich cities like San Francisco and Seattle have gotten so expensive that working-class people cannot afford to move there. Even if they could, there would not be much point, since whatever they gained in pay would be swallowed up by rent. 

Stop and rejoice. This is, after all, the New York Times, not the Cato Review. One might expect high housing prices to get blamed on developers, greed, or something, and the solution to be government-constructed housing, "affordable" housing mandates, rent controls, low-income housing subsidies (which protect incumbent low-income people, not those who want to move in to get better jobs) and even more restrictions.

No. The Times, the Obama Administration, California Governor Gerry Brown, have figured out that zoning laws are to blame, and they're making social stratification and inequality worse.

Syverson on the productivity slowdown

Chad Syverson has an interesting new paper on the sources of the productivity slowdown.

Background to wake you up: Long-term US growth is slowing down. This is a (the!) big important issue in economics (one previous post).  And productivity -- how much each person can produce per hour -- is the only source of long-term growth. We are not vastly better off than our grandparents because we negotiated better wages for hacking at coal with pickaxes.

Why is productivity slowing down? Perhaps we've run out of ideas (Gordon). Perhaps a savings glut and the  zero bound drive secular stagnation lack of demand (Summers). Perhaps the out of control regulatory leviathan is killing growth with a thousand cuts (Cochrane).

Or maybe productivity  isn't declining at all, we're just measuring new products badly (Varian; Silicon Valley). Google maps is free! If so, we are living with undiagnosed but healthy deflation, and real GDP growth is actually doing well.

Chad:

First, the productivity slowdown has occurred in dozens of countries, and its size is unrelated to measures of the countries’ consumption or production intensities of information and communication technologies ... Second, estimates... of the surplus created by internet-linked digital technologies fall far short of the $2.7 trillion or more of “missing output” resulting from the productivity growth slowdown...Third, if measurement problems were to account for even a modest share of this missing output, the properly measured output and productivity growth rates of industries that produce and service ICTs [internet] would have to have been multiples of their measured growth in the data. Fourth, while measured gross domestic income has been on average higher than measured gross domestic product since 2004—perhaps indicating workers are being paid to make products that are given away for free or at highly discounted prices—this trend actually began before the productivity slowdown and moreover reflects unusually high capital income rather than labor income (i.e., profits are unusually high). In combination, these complementary facets of evidence suggest that the reasonable prima facie case for the mismeasurement hypothesis faces real hurdles when confronted with the data.

An interesting read throughout. 

[Except for that last sentence, a near parody of academic caution!]  

How to raise GDP 10%, and reduce inequality too

Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti have a very nice new working paper "Why do Cities Matter?"

..increased wage dispersion lowered aggregate U.S. GDP by 13.5%  Most of the loss was likely caused by increased constraints to housing supply in high productivity cities like New York, San Francisco and San Jose. Lowering regulatory constraints in these cities to the level of the median city would expand their work force and increase U.S. GDP by 9.5%. 

Roughly, the same worker, working the same job, in San Jose or San Francisco, earns double what he or she earns somewhere else in the country.  Here is their plot of wages across cities:

Sure: Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti

The right tail there isn't just missing -- it was absent in 1964. There weren't any cities (MSA's) with 50% higher wages than average in 1964. That's New York, San Francisco and San Jose now.

What does this have to do with growth?

Central Bank Governance and Oversight Reform

The Hoover Institution Press just published "Central Bank Governance and Oversight Reform," the collected volume of papers, comments, and discussion from last May's conference here by the same name. You can get the  book or e-book here at the Hoover press or here at amazon.com. The individual chapter pdfs are available here.  Press release here.

(My modest contributions are in the preface and a discussion of Paul Tucker's Chapter 1. I agree it would be nice to have a more rule-based approach to lender of last resort and bailout functions, but wouldn't lots of equity so you don't have to mop up so often be even better?)

This is part of an emerging series of monetary policy conferences at Hoover. Tomorrow we will have a conference on international monetary policy. Stay tuned...

NBER AP

On Friday I attended the NBER Asset Pricing meeting (program here) in Chicago, organized by Adrien Verdelhan and Debby Lucas. The papers were unusually interesting, even by the high standards of this meeting. Alas the NBER doesn't post slides so I don't have great visuals to show you.

Tilting at Bubbles

Source: Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal reports on the "Fed's Unsolved Puzzle: How to Deflate Bubbles" (That's the print version headline, much pithier than online.)

I thought I was reading The Onion. There it is, a graph marked "Asset Bubbles," measured, apparently, with interferometer precision.

Fixed-income comments

A month ago,  I attended the SF Fed/Bank of Canada conference on fixed income. I had the chance to comment on Michael Bauer and Jim Hamilton's "Robust Bond Risk Premia.” My comments here.

As usual when faced with a really nice paper, I used most of my discussion time to survey the field and give my views on current facts and challenges, which is why my comments might be interesting to blog readers.

Some highlights: I reran regressions of bond returns in the style of Joslin, Priebsch, and Singleton, forecasting returns with the first  three principal components of yields, and growth and inflation. Here are the results:

Permazero

St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard gave a very interesting paper at the Cato monetary conference, with this great title.

Jim starts with this great picture. It's a simulation of the standard three equation new Keynesian model as we go from 2% interest rate to zero. This is an upside down version of the first graph in my "Do higher interest rates raise or lower inflation." (Blog post) But Jim makes a new and insightful point with it, that had not occurred to me.

Jim reads this as an account of what happened in 2008, not (my) tentative prediction for what might happen in 2016 in the other direction. It's compelling: The Fed lowers rates. This boosts output (black line) over what it would otherwise be, overcoming the horrendous negative shocks to the economy from a financial crisis. Inflation gently declines, which is also what inflation did after a one time shock in 2009, related to the output shock which the Fed was offsetting.

Taylor Truman Medal Speech

John Taylor's speech  on receiving the Truman medal for economic policy is noteworthy. John thinks about the institutions that govern monetary and financial policy. We spend too much time on the will-she-raise-rates-or-won't-she sort of decisions that we forget how important this institutional structure is to good, predictable and (as John might put it) rule-based policy.

John reflects on the institutions of postwar policy:

Seventy years ago Harry Truman signed the Bretton Woods Agreements Act of 1945. It officially created two new economic institutions: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. A year later he signed the Employment Act of 1946. It created two more new institutions: the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and the Congress’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC). And in 1947 came the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the Truman Doctrine, and in 1948 the Marshall Plan.

The 13 Trillion Dollar Question

On Tuesday Nov 10 there will be a conference in Chicago on "The $13 Trillion Question: Managing the U.S. Government’s Debt" hosted by the Initiative on Global Markets at Chicago Booth, and the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings. (The Brookings announcement here.)

Robin Greenwood will present "The Optimal Maturity of Government Debt and Debt Management Conflicts between the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve" arguing that the Fed and Treasury are working to cross-purposes -- the Fed buys what the Treasury sells -- and that the government  should go after low rates on long term bonds rather than the budget insurance of issuing long term bonds.

(The government faces the same decision a homeowner does: borrow at near-zero floating rates,  but maybe rates shoot up and so do your payments, or borrow long at 2% rates, and pay more if rates don't go up. Robin and Larry favor the former. I'm more risk averse. Maybe living in California has sensitized me  that just because you haven't seen an earthquake recently doesn't mean you shouldn't buy earthquake insurance. But it's a good argument to have qualitatively -- what's the risk, and what's the reward.)

I will present "A new structure for Federal Debt," arguing for an overhaul of which instruments the Treasury issues, to make them more useful for financial markets and financial stability as well as for government borrowing and risk management. (Earlier blog post about this paper here.)

There will be extensive discussion and broader issues, and (the big draw) a panel of Seth  Carpenter, Charles Evans, and Sara Sprung, moderated by David Wessel.

The conference is by invitation, but you can still sign up here until they run out of room, or email Jennifer (dot) Williams at chicagobooth (dot) edu. It will also be viewable by live webcast, link here, starting 1:30 central.

Update: Video of the event here.

Inequality and Economic Policy Published

The Hoover Press put up for free the chapters of Inequality and Economic Policy: Essays In Memory of Gary Becker, edited by Tom Church, John Taylor, and Christopher Miller. You can of course still buy the book for a reasonable $14.95.

This includes the published version of my essay Why and How We Care about Inequality, also available on my webpage.  Bryan Caplan was kind enough to cover it positively last week, now you can read the original. I put a draft up on this blog last year, so I won't repeat it all today. As usual, the published version is better.

The rest of the contents:

Chapter 1: Background Facts By James Piereson

Chapter 2: The Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent By Joshua D. Rauh

Chapter 3: The Economic Determinants of Top Income Inequality By Charles I. Jones

Chapter 4: Intergenerational Mobility and Income Inequality By Jörg L. Spenkuch

Chapter 5: The Effects of Redistribution Policies on Growth and Employment By Casey B. Mulligan

Chapter 6: Income and Wealth in America By Kevin M. Murphy and Emmanuel Saez

Chapter 7: Conclusions and Solutions By John H. Cochrane, Lee E. Ohanian, and George P. Shultz

Chapter 8: Contents by Edward P. Lazear adn George P. Shultz

Uncle Sam Spam

I talked a bit to Binyamin Applebaum about his article in the New York Times, Behaviorists Show the U.S. How to Improve Government Operations. As preparation, I read the Social and Behavioral sciences team annual report which he was covering.

Applebaum's article reflects much of the usual New York Times cheerleading for behaviorism and nudge/nanny programs.

Reading the report, I came away more approving of some aspects than blog readers might think, but a little more skeptical of some aspects than Applebaum's article.

• The bottom line is spam. The government wants to send you letters, email, and text messages to sell its programs.  The limits and objections to the program are pretty obvious once you recognize that fact. Spam gets ineffective pretty quickly, and once we start getting spam from 150 different programs nudging us to do different things, spam will get even more ineffective even more quickly. 
• If it's a good idea for the government to send us spam email and text messages, why are academic behavioral scientists the ones to do it, not professional spammers (sorry, "direct marketers")? The actual end result of this is more employment and consulting contracts for academic behavioral economics. 
• The numbers in the report are surprisingly small. Sending spam raises the number of people taking advantage of some program from 2% to 2.2%, which can be sold as a 10 percent increase.  Even I, somewhat of a skeptic to start, am amazed how low the effects are. And both before and after numbers are incredibly small. The big news in this report is that we're full of government programs that only a few percent of the available people are taking advantage of! That might be great news for the budget, but shocking news of effectiveness.  

The decline in long-term interest rates

Source: Council of Economic Advisers

Long term interest rates are trending down around the world. And it's not just since the great recession and financial crisis. The same trend has been going on for decades.

The Council of Economic Advisers just issued an excellent report surveying our understanding of this question. A blog post summary by Maury Obstfeld and Linda Tesar.

(Many other interesting CEA reports here. Occupational licensing is next on my in box.)

The report is really well done, for explaining the economic issues in clear simple terms, but without hesitating to use a model and an equation when necessary. If you're wondering how to keep your undergraduate or MBA class (heck, your PhD class) busy this week, this report will do the trick.

There is some grumbling in economics circles about the CEA and what role it should play, between Sunday morning talk show cheerleader for the Administration's policies vs. providing dispassionate  economic analysis to the Administration and country. This kind of report is the kind of CEA I cheer for.

I won't summarize the whole thing. Maury and Linda's blog post blog post does a great job of that, and you should just go read it. A few comments however.

Bank at the Fed

"Segregated Balance Accounts" is a nice new paper by Rodney Garratt, Antoine Martin, James McAndrews, and Ed Nosal.

Currently, large depositors, especially companies, have a problem. If they put money in banks, deposit insurance is limited. So, they use money market funds, overnight repo, and other very short-term overnight debt instead to park cash. If you've got $10 million in cash, these are safer than banks. But they're prone to runs, which cause little financial hiccups like fall 2008.

But there is a way to have completely run-free interest-paying money, not needing any taxpayer guarantee: Let people and companies invest in interest-paying reserves at the Fed. Or, allow narrow deposit-taking: deposits channeled 100% to reserves at the Fed.

(I'm being persnickety about language. I don't like the words "narrow banking." I like "narrow deposit-taking" and "equity-financed banking," to be clear that banking can stay as big as it wants.)

That's essentially what Segregated Balance Accounts are. A big depositor gives money to a bank, the bank invests it in reserves. If the bank goes under, the depositor immediately gets the reserves, which just need to be transferred to another bank. This gets around the pesky limitation that the Fed is not supposed to take deposits from people and institutions that aren't legally banks.