Time for a Sterling Crisis?

The UK pound plunged again earlier this month:

two dates are marked with vertical lines: the the Brexit vote (red line) and the Prime Minister's speech signalling that the most likely outcome was a "hard Brexit" (green line) where the UK leaves the European single market (i.e., that it won't become part of the European Economic Area, like Finland* Norway, or negotiate an arrangement like Switzerland's).

Departure from the EU and the single market make the UK a less attractive location for foreign investment (see, e.g., comments from Nissan's CEO about its Sunderland plant).  A decrease in demand for UK assets implies a drop in the pound.  The UK is also a less attractive location for domestic investment now as well, and the situation is probably not a good one for consumer confidence - a reduction in demand due to lower desired consumption and investment would imply lower interest rates, which also would cause the pound to fall.

Is this yet another "sterling crisis"?  Not in the usual sense - as Gavyn Davies notes, there is no fixed exchange rate to defend this time, and most of the UK's external debt is denominated in pounds.

As Paul Krugman explains, a fall in the pound is a part of the adjustment process.  He writes:

But it’s important to be aware that not everyone in Britain is equally affected. Pre-Brexit, Britain was obviously experiencing a version of the so-called Dutch disease. In its traditional form, this referred to the way natural resource exports crowd out manufacturing by keeping the currency strong. In the UK case, the City’s financial exports play the same role. So their weakening helps British manufacturing – and, maybe, the incomes of people who live far from the City and still depend directly or indirectly on manufacturing for their incomes.

However, a rebalancing of the UK economy in favor of manufacturing exports will not come quickly, according to Barry Eichengreen (Robert Skidelsky goes further and argues for helping the process along through "import substitution" policies).

One likely consequence is inflation, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes.  Prices of imported goods will rise significantly (though the process of "exchange rate pass-through" generally occurs with a lag - the "marmite row" may have been a harbinger of things to come).  The inflation will hit lower-income families especially hard, according to Evans-Pritchard's column, because the government has frozen some benefit payments, so inflation will cause their real value to fall.

Rising costs for imports don't only impact consumers - they also affect producers.  On the one hand, domestic producers benefit from increases in the relative prices of imported substitutes.  On the other - and this is becoming more and more relevant in an age of global supply chains - prices of imported inputs (intermediate goods) will rise, increasing production costs.

With the rise in cost of intermediate inputs and the greater costs of selling to its main trading partners, the impact of Brexit looks like a negative supply shock.  Supply shocks create a nasty dilemma for monetary policy.  Policy can "accommodate" the shock by allowing inflation to rise - doing so minimizes the increase in unemployment and helps keep output near its (diminished) potential.  Or the Bank of England could tighten policy to keep inflation in check, with negative consequences for output and employment.

The risk with accommodation is not just inflation itself, but a potential increase in inflation expectations and loss of the central bank's credibility. Part of the standard interpretation of 1970's stagflation is that the Fed was too accommodating after the 1973 oil shock, and which contributed to inflation expectations getting out of control.

The Bank of England has a formal 2% inflation target; right now inflation is running below target, but that will change.

I personally think its to Bank of England's credit that it's allowed inflation go above target at a couple of points during the turmoil of recent years.  If their policy is credible, an occasional miss doesn't cause inflation expectations to rise.  But the point of inflation targeting is to achieve credibility by meeting a stated target, so the BofE may be putting that at risk if it's always seen to be accommodating shocks.

*corrected 10/26

Lies, Damned Lies and Ireland's GDP

Being an academic economist can be humbling - while it involves learning lots of esoteric stuff, it also makes one much more aware of how much one doesn't know.  But I know this much is true: the total amount of goods and services produced in Ireland did not increase by 26.3% in 2015.

But that's what Ireland's Central Statistics Office has reported.  It's not entirely clear how they came to such a (literally) incredible figure for real GDP growth.   The expenditure approach to calculating GDP adds up purchases of new final goods and services in four categories - consumption (C), investment (I), government purchases (G) and net exports (NX).  I took the data from table 6 of their release and normalized each component to 100 in 2010 to illustrate how the change is driven by large jumps in I and NX.

News reports have focused on activities of multinational corporations, particularly on "inversions" which involve transferring their legal headquarters to Ireland in order to take advantage of its low corporate tax rates.

That may be correct, but its not an entirely satisfying explanation.  GDP is supposed to measure the value of goods and services produced in a country.  The legal domicile of the corporations producing it is irrelevant.  Ownership of capital - both physical machinery, equipment and structures and also intangible forms (intellectual property, etc.) - also is irrelevant, so the fact that multinational corporations like to hold IP in Ireland for tax reasons shouldn't matter in principle.

Gross National Product (GNP) adds up the total value of goods and services produced with resources owned by a country's citizens.  Since many multinational corporations operate in Ireland, it has higher GDP than GNP because some of its GDP is produced using foreign-owned capital - the same data release showed a shocking increase of 18.7% in Ireland's GNP last year.

The information released by the CSO is not very detailed.  The FT Alphaville's Matthew Klein, Bloomberg Columnist Leonid Bershidsky, and Seamus Coffey at the Irish Economy blog have made useful attempts at sorting things out.

Clearly, the way the CSO is calculating GDP is failing to correspond to the concept.  Statistical agencies need to provide estimates calculated in a consistent fashion, so it wouldn't have been appropriate for them to suddenly decide to calculate it differently because they got a strange number.  But the methods for estimating GDP are not etched in stone.  If legal and accounting maneuvers of multinationals are distorting some of their source data, they need to find a way of correcting for it.  Standards for national accounts are coordinated internationally and it is not clear whether the problems in this report are due to something the CSO is doing or a more general methodological issue which happens to be most apparent because of Ireland's unique circumstances.

Statistical agencies update their methods and revise their estimates regularly - e.g., in 2013, the US BEA did a "comprehensive revision" that began the treatment of development of intellectual property as a component of investment (see this earlier blog post).  I hope the CSO will release more information to help everyone better understand what's gone wrong with their figures.  That will be a first step towards correcting the method used to estimate GDP and producing a revised set of figures - one which will not show a 26% increase in real GDP in 2015.

Update: Procedures mandated by Eurostat are mostly to blame, writes Colm McCarthy.

Hysteresis in a New Keynesian Model

I've posted a draft of my research paper, "Hysteresis in a New Keynesian Model" on my website.  The paper proposes a way of modelling hysteresis and integrates it into a New Keynesian macro model.

The widely noted rightward shift of the Beveridge curve relationship can be interpreted as evidence of less efficient matching between employers and workers in the labor market

In the paper, I argue that less-efficient matching is related to the increased duration of unemployment spells seen during the last recession and its aftermath.  There are several reasons why matching may be less efficient with a higher proportion of long-term unemployed:

1. a loss of information as workers' informal networks may dry up over time
2. a stigma associated with long-term unemployment (i.e., it acts as a negative signal)
3. decreased search effort by long-term unemployed

I cite empirical evidence for (2) and (3) in the paper.   The paper does not take a stand on the mechanism causing the relationship between matching efficiency and duration of unemployment.

The model includes a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search-and-matching labor market framework, where hires (H) are a function of the number of vacancies (V) posted by firms and unemployed (U) workers

Hysteresis is modeled with the assumption that matching efficiency (A) is a decreasing function of the average duration of unemployment spells.

Rearranging the matching function to solve for efficiency (and setting alpha to 0.5), we can see that a decrease in efficiency coincides with the increase in the duration of unemployment spells

With hysteresis, the response of unemployment to a negative productivity shock is smaller initially but more persistent, as shown by the impulse response functions:

The reason for this is that, in the absence of hysteresis, firms can adjust their labor by sharply decreasing their vacancy posting.  With hysteresis, the response of vacancies is less dramatic because firms take into account the fact that hiring will be more difficult in the future due to the decline in matching efficiency.

The model also considers demand shocks, which take the form of shocks to the discount factor, and monetary shocks (deviations from the Taylor rule), with similar results.  Overall, hysteresis acts as a mechanism that increases the persistence of the response of macroeconomic variables to shocks.  Since macro models struggle to generate endogenous persistence, this may be one of the main selling points of the paper.

Hysteresis also generates movements in the "natural rate" of unemployment, which I proxy by computing the amount of unemployment that would occur if wages and prices were flexible, taking as given the evolution of matching efficiency (A) from the baseline model.  The green line shows the change in the natural rate in response to a negative productivity shock:

Note: this is a revised version of the draft circulated last fall as my "job market paper".

Productivity Pessimism

I'm hoping I'll have a chance to read Robert Gordon's new book soon, though one of the ironies of being a college professor is that the job doesn't seem to leave much time to read.  Fortunately, Gordon presents a condensed version of the argument in a recent Bloomberg View column, where he explains that he doesn't expect a return to the rapid productivity growth of the mid-20th century.  He writes:

The 1920-70 expansion grew out of the second industrial revolution, when fossil fuels, the internal-combustion engine, advanced metals and factory automation came together to produce electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, television and much longer life expectancy.

The "third industrial revolution" - computers and the internet - is less significant, in his view:

Although revolutionary, the Internet's effects were limited when compared with the second industrial revolution, which changed everything. The former had little effect on purchases of food, clothing, cars, furniture, fuel and appliances. A pedicure is a pedicure whether the customer is reading a magazine or surfing the web on a smartphone. Computers aren't everywhere: We don’t eat, wear or drive them to work. We don't let them cut our hair. We live in dwellings that have appliances much like those of the 1950s and we drive in motor vehicles that perform the same functions as in the 1950s, albeit with more convenience and safety.

Our main measure of technological progress is total factor productivity (tfp) growth, which is sometimes called the "Solow residual" because it is calculated as a leftover, by subtracting from output growth the portions that can be explained by changes in capital and labor.  That is, it is the growth that would occur even if there was no change in the factors of production.

Turning points in tfp growth can be hard to identify because the data are somewhat volatile from year-to-year and have a cyclical component.  With hindsight, economists identified a productivity slowdown around 1973 and a resurgence - with information technology playing a leading role - in the mid-1990s.  However, tfp growth has generally been weak since 2005, raising the question of whether the IT-led productivity boom is over.

Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics

This San Francisco Fed Letter from last year discusses some of the reasons for the productivity slowdown.  Gordon's book was the subject of an Eduardo Porter column and a Paul Krugman review.

Update (2/25): In an interview with Ezra Klein, Bill Gates argues against Gordon's view.

Hysteresis and Monetary Policy

In the Washington Post last week, Larry Summers wrote about some new research finding evidence of "hysteresis."  This is a term borrowed from the natural sciences for when temporary occurrences have lasting effects - e.g., when you hold a magnet up to a piece of metal, the metal remains magnetized even after you remove the magnet.  In macroeconomics, hysteresis occurs when an economic downturn has a lasting effect on economic capacity (i.e., reduced "potential output"); that is, lack of demand creates its own lack of supply.

Hysteresis could occur through a number of channels. Consider an economy described by an aggregate production function Y* = AF(K,N*) where potential GDP (Y*) depends on productivity (A),  capital (K) and labor at its "natural" or "full-employment" level, N*.  A recession occurs when output falls below Y* and labor is below N* (i.e., there is unemployment in excess of the "natural rate").  Hysteresis implies that there is a lasting impact on Y* - this could occur through technology, capital or labor.

All three channels could be operative. In the past several years, productivity growth has been sluggish, though its not clear if this is linked with the recession (productivity trends are always somewhat mysterious).  The recovery of investment (the rate of flow into the stock of capital) from the recession has been less than spectacular, even taking out housing - the share of GDP devoted to nonresidential fixed investment is somewhat below its peak in previous expansions. 

Here, I want to focus on labor, where the hysteresis effects are pretty evident, and raise an interesting policy dilemma. 

Although the unemployment rate has fallen to what we might consider a reasonably healthy level of 5% (the normal turnover of a healthy labor market generates some unemployment so we never expect it to get to zero), the labor market still clearly bears the scars of the 2008-09 recession.

The duration of unemployment spells rose to unprecedented levels and has remained elevated (a useful comparison is to the 1981-82 recession - the unemployment rate peaked at 10.8% at the end of 1982, but the dynamics of duration were not nearly as severe).

People with spells of long-term unemployment have a harder time finding jobs.  But looking at the unemployed leaves out those who left the labor force entirely.  The last several years have seen a significant drop in labor force participation rates, even among people aged 25-54 (focusing on this group is a rough way to control for the drop in overall participation due to an aging population, though as this Calculated Risk post notes, there is a composition effect even within the 'prime age' group).

The labor market clearly is not as robust as the headline unemployment rate suggests.

What are the implications for monetary policy of having a high proportion of long-term unemployed, and possibly a substantial latent group of unemployed who have left the labor force?  One answer is suggested by this St Louis Fed blog post by Stephen Williamson:

[I]f we think of the long-term unemployed as being subject to the mismatch problem and highly likely to leave the labor force, then these unemployed workers are not contributing much to labor market slack. They are unlikely to be hired under any conditions. 

That is, the unemployment (and presumably the depressed particpation rate, too) is "structural" in nature, and not amenable to any improvement in aggregate demand that might be generated with expansionary monetary policy.

An alternative view is that the long-term unemployed, and some of those who have exited the labor force, could be brought back into employment by particularly strong aggregate demand - what used to be called a "high pressure" economy.  This would be possible if the forces of hysteresis work in both directions, as this 1999 paper by Laurence Ball suggested.

That seemed to me to be what Janet Yellen was hinting at in her September speech at UMass-Amherst when she said:

Reducing slack along these other dimensions may involve a temporary decline in the unemployment rate somewhat below the level that is estimated to be consistent, in the longer run, with inflation stabilizing at 2 percent. For example, attracting discouraged workers back into the labor force may require a period of especially plentiful employment opportunities and strong hiring. Similarly, firms may be unwilling to restructure their operations to use more full-time workers until they encounter greater difficulty filling part-time positions. Beyond these considerations, a modest decline in the unemployment rate below its long-run level for a time would, by increasing resource utilization, also have the benefit of speeding the return to 2 percent inflation. Finally, albeit more speculatively, such an environment might help reverse some of the significant supply-side damage that appears to have occurred in recent years, thereby improving Americans' standard of living.

It seems to be that doing this would likely entail the Fed overshooting its 2% inflation target.  I have my doubts about their willingness to do this (and Yellen certainly did not suggest it).  And for it to work, inflation expectations would need to remain anchored (i.e., if any additional inflation just ratched up expectations, it would not bring unemployment down).

A Note on "Credibility"

Fed watchers are speculating that the FOMC meeting later this month might be the occasion to raise the federal funds rate target off the "zero lower bound," where it has been since December 2008.  In a column arguing against such a move, Larry Summers writes:

From the Depression to the Vietnam War to the Iraq war to the euro crisis, we surely should learn that policymakers who elevate credibility over responding to clear realities make grave errors. The best way the Fed can maintain and enhance its credibility is to support a fully employed American economy achieving its inflation target with stable financial conditions. The greatest damage it could do to its credibility would be to embrace central-banking shibboleth disconnected from current economic reality.

At the Fiscal Times, Mark Thoma writes:

The inflation problems of the 1970s, the loss of Fed credibility that came with it, and the need to impose the Volcker recession in the early 1980s to bring inflation down to tolerable levels made an indelible impression on policymakers who lived through that time period. The Fed’s trigger-happy response to any suggestion of an inflation problem is directly related to the desire to never let such an inflation outburst happen again.

But it has been more than four decades since the beginning of the inflation problems of the 1970s, and the economic environment in which monetary policy operates has changed considerably since that time. Those changes support patience, particularly in response to increases in wages, wages that have been stagnant since the 1970s even as labor productivity has been increasing.

The "credibility" argument in monetary policy is based on the idea that the central bank will be tempted to use inflation to "overheat" the economy and bring unemployment down below its "natural" (or equilibrium) levels for political reasons - e.g., to help the incumbent party in an election year.  Any gains would be, at best, short-lived, as people would incorporate a higher level of inflation into their expectations and set wages and prices accordingly.  Based on this logic - which seems helpful for interpreting how we got into the "stagflation" of the 1970s - economists look for policies and institutional structures to correct this perceived inflationary bias.

In the past several years, this logic seems turned on its head.  If anything, the biases of our monetary policymakers appear to be in the other direction.  Inflation continues to be subdued, as this plot of one of the Fed's preferred measures, the "core" deflator for personal consumption expenditures, shows:

The red line is drawn at 2%.  Measures of expected inflation are also below 2%.  David Beckworth recently argued that the Fed is acting as if 2% is a ceiling, not a target - he suggests the Fed's behavior is consistent with it aiming to keep inflation between 1% and 2%.

But the the Fed declared in 2012: "The Committee judges that inflation at the rate of 2 percent, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, is most consistent over the longer run with the Federal Reserve's statutory mandate." If the goal is to "anchor" expectations at 2%, the Fed is at risk of failing, but the greater threat to its credibility seems to be too little inflation, not too much.

Stories from the Macro Wars

Ian Parker's recent New Yorker profile of Yanis Varoufakis included this nugget: "He has written of his hope, as a professor, to present economics as 'a contested terrain on which armies of ideas clash mercilessly.'"

That may be an apt description of macroeconomics in the 1970s and 1980s.  On his website, Paul Romer has offered an interesting take on the methodenstreit between the dynamic general equilibrium approach (so-called "freshwater" macro, championed by Robert Lucas) and Keynesian macro-econometric models (the "saltwater" camp).  Romer is particularly critical of Robert Solow, arguing that his dismissive attitude towards Lucas et al., contributed into a counterproductive hardening of differences. He writes:

Solow also seemed to be motivated to attack harshly because he was concerned that the type of model Lucas was developing might undermine political support for active countercyclical policy. To his credit, there was a legitimate basis for this concern. The new Chicago school of macro eventually did oppose an active response to the financial crisis and its aftermath. But the type of response that Solow exemplified may actually have contributed to the emergence of this new Chicago school. In retrospect, if the goal was to maintain support for active macro policy, the better course would have been to take seriously what the rebel group that was forming around Lucas was saying. This might have kept the rebels from cutting off contact with all outsiders, even those who were taking seriously the issues they were raising.

Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman responded in defense of Solow. DeLong writes:

And, at this point, Romer ought to say that Solow’s and Hahn’s criticisms were (a) no more biting in their rhetoric than the criticisms that Stigler, Friedman, and company had been inflicting on their victims at Chicago for a generation, and (b) correct and accurate.

Romer has more interesting detail in his response, including this summary of the main points:

In the summer of 1978, Lucas and Sargent were making three claims:

(a) Existing multi-equation macro simulation models were not identified. That is, these models summarized correlations in the data but did not yield reliable statements of the form “if the government does X, this will cause Y to happen.”

(b) It was time to use SAGE models to address such fundamental questions about economic fluctuations as why changes in the supply of money influence economic activity; and

(c) SAGE models will imply that an active monetary policy cannot stabilize economic fluctuations.

Solow thought that Lucas and Sargent were wrong about the policy ineffectiveness claim (c). DeLong, Krugman, and I all agree. In the 2013 introduction to his collected papers, Lucas uses some asides about the Great Depression and the Great Recession to admit that now even he agrees. Claim (c) is what DeLong and Krugman have in mind when they say that  Solow was right and Lucas was wrong.
Yet all macroeconomists now agree that Lucas and Sargent were correct about the fatal problems with the large simulation models. Much of Solow’s response amounted to an implausible denial that there was anything wrong with them. So on this point, the roles are reversed. Lucas and Sargent were right and Solow was wrong.

[Romer uses "SAGE" to refer to general equilibrium models].  See also: this from Krugman, and this from DeLong.  David Glasner has a thoughtful post putting things in a broader context.

In his post, Romer cites several papers, including Lucas and Sargent's "After Keynesian Macroeconomics," from the 1978 Boston Fed conference.  Perhaps it should be known as "the throwdown in Edgartown."

Fascinating stuff... but fortunately for contemporary macroeconomists - particularly those of us with conflict-averse midwestern temperaments - things aren't nearly so rancorous now.  There certainly are differences of inclination and opinion, and economists can be blunt in expressing their differences, but the "saltwater" vs. "freshwater" cleavage is largely a thing of the past, as this Steven Williamson post explains.  Since the wars of the 1970s and 80s, there has been some convergence: macroeconomists have developed a class of models - sometimes called "New Keynesian" - which respond to Lucas' methodological critique but also allow for a stabilizing role for macroeconomic policy.  That's not to suggest we've figured it all out, of course; this recent Mark Thoma column highlights some of the weak points of contemporary theory.

2Q GDP

The BEA released the advance estimate of second quarter GDP growth today: the good news is that US output grew at a 2.3% annual rate in the period - a healthy, though unspectacular, pace.  The growth was largely driven by consumption (about 70% of GDP), which grew at a 2.9% rate.  Also, the BEA revised up its estimate of growth in first quarter to an 0.6% rate, from -0.2% in the previous release.

The more disappointing news came in the "annual revision" of estimates for 2012-2014 which were included in today's release.  The new estimates indicate that the agonizingly slow recovery has been a little more sluggish than we previously thought - GDP growth was revised downwards 0.1pt for 2012 and 0.7pt for 2013.

The red line shows the revised figures, the blue line is the previous estimate.  The lower estimates of output growth also imply that labor productivity - output per unit of labor - growth was a little slower than previously thought.  Since labor productivity is the main determinant of changes in living standards over time, further evidence that it has shifted to a lower trend is a discouraging indication about long-run prospects.

This release also had an interesting wrinkle: the BEA is also now releasing the average of the standard expenditure-based GDP figure and the income-based measure (which it calls Gross Domestic Income).  In principle, they should be the same, but, in practice, there is usually a "statistical discrepancy."  This issue brief from the Council of Economic Advisors explains why the average - which its calling "Gross Domestic Output" (we'll see if that sticks...) might be a better indicator.

A Theory of Production

Economists often use the word "technology" to mean the relationship between output and factors of production such as capital and labor.  The Cobb-Douglas production function, which is a ubiquitous description of technology has its origin in a 1928 AER article, "A Theory of Production," by Charles Cobb and Paul Douglas.

Using C to denote capital, L for labor and P for production, the production function makes its first appearance:

Although the description of technology is a theoretical contribution, much of the article is empirical in nature, as they construct indexes of capital and labor in order to test their model.  They compare the production implied by their function and estimates of capital and labor, P', with a measure of actual production.

To a contemporary macroeconomist reader, the striking thing about the article is the extent to which it anticipates how we analyze business cycles today.  Cobb and Douglas, separate out cyclical and trend components (using 3 year moving averages) and show that the deviations of actual production and the production implied by changes in capital and labor are procyclical.

The article includes a chronology of business cycles which aligns with the NBER chronology; the NBER recessions during this period are

• June 1899 - Dec. 1900
• Sept. 1902 - Aug. 1904
• May 1907 - June 1908
• Jan. 1910 - Jan. 1912
• Jan. 1913 - Dec. 1914
• Aug. 1918 - Mar. 1919
• Jan. 1920 - July 1921

Cobb and Douglas' estimates are annual, but several of these do line up with points where P' (implied production) exceeds actual production, P.

Today these deviations of actual output from the amount implied by changes in factors of production are known as "Solow residuals" after work by Robert Solow in the 1950s and interpreted as measures of technological progress (i.e., our ability to wring more output out of given amounts of capital and labor).  Although Solow was mainly concerned with long-run growth trends, in the 1980's, Real Business Cycle theorists interpreted short-run fluctuations as "technology shocks".  In Real Business Cycle models these shocks drive economic fluctuations, and the same pattern identified by Cobb and Douglas - using postwar data and newer detrending techniques - was cited in support of this theory.  One weakness of this argument is that short run movements in the Solow residual are at least partly due to utilization - "factor hoarding" - rather than changes in technology.  This, too, was anticipated by Cobb and Douglas:

The index does not of course measure the short-time fluctuations in the amount of capital used.  Thus, no allowance is made for the capital which is allowed to be idle during periods of business depression nor for the greater than normal intensity of use int he form of second shifts etc., which characterizes the periods of prospertity.

Overall, this article would fit very well into a syllabus for a current course on business cycle theory.  Hmm...

Q1 GDP

From the BEA, a disappointing first estimate of first quarter GDP: they have the annualized growth rate at a mere 0.2%.

Consumption, the largest part of GDP, was a bit stronger at 1.9%, but government purchases were a drag, falling at a -0.8% rate.  The strong dollar helped reduce net exports; exports fell at a 7.2% rate.  Another worrying note is that there was a substantial positive contribution from inventories - while this adds to GDP, it also means a greater stock of unsold goods which could lead firms to cut back production in the future. 

This isn't the first time in recent memory that first quarter GDP has seemed weak.  As Justin Wolfers notes, it seems like something may be off with the seasonal adjustment (i.e., the government attempts to take out the normal seasonal patterns, like the decline in retail after the holidays).  While the seasonal adjustment should take into account typical effects of weather, White House economic advisor Jason Furman notes that this winter was harsher than usual.

Another major indicator of economic activity is growth in payrolls, which averaged a reasonably healthy 197,000 during the first three months of the year.  So I don't think the GDP estimate - which is, as always, subject to substantial revision anyway - is cause for panic, but it is a cautionary signal to the Fed as it contemplates when to start raising the federal funds rate target.

Just the Varoufakis, Ma'am

An interesting BBC interview with Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister of the new Greek government (interview begins at about 3:30):

If the eurozone breaks apart - and it seems we're back to worrying about that yet again - I don't think it will be because the Greeks are being unreasonable (or uncool). 

Varoufakis also spoke with Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

Mr Varoufakis is braced for an arid meeting on Thursday with his German counterpart and long-time nemesis Wolfgang Schäuble, a man he once accused – borrowing from Tacitus - of reducing Europe to a desert and calling it peace.

“I will try to be as charming as I can in Berlin. I will tell Mr Schäuble that we may be a Left-wing riff-raff but he can count on our Syriza movement to clear away Greece’s cartels and oligarchies, and push through the deep reforms of the Greek state that governments before us refused to do,” he said.

“But I will also tell him that we are going to end the debt-deflation spiral and do what should have been done five years ago. That is not negotiable. We have a democratic mandate to challenge the whole philosophy of austerity,” he said.

In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman clarified how we should think if the conflict between Greece and the EU-ECB-IMF "troika" -

[A]t this point Greek debt, measured as a stock, is not a very meaningful number. After all, the great bulk of the debt is now officially held, the interest rate bears little relationship to market prices, and the interest payments come in part out of funds lent by the creditors. In a sense the debt is an accounting fiction; it’s whatever the governments trying to dictate terms to Greece decide to say it is.

OK, I know it’s not quite that simple — debt as a number has political and psychological importance. But I think it helps clear things up to put all of that aside for a bit and focus on the aspect of the situation that isn’t a matter of definitions: Greece’s primary surplus, the difference between what it takes in via taxes and what it spends on things other than interest. This surplus — which is a flow, not a stock — represents the amount Greece is actually paying, in the form of real resources, to its creditors, as opposed to borrowing funds to pay interest.

Greece has been running a primary surplus since 2013, and according to its agreements with the troika it’s supposed to run a surplus of 4.5 percent of GDP for many years to come. What would it mean to relax that target?

It would not mean demanding that creditors throw good money after bad; everyone has already implicitly acknowledged that the debt will never be fully paid at market rates, but Greece is making a transfer to its creditors by running a primary surplus, and we’re just arguing now about how big that transfer will be.

At Project Syndicate, Joe Stiglitz writes:

So it is not debt restructuring, but its absence, that is “immoral.” There is nothing particularly special about the dilemmas that Greece faces today; many countries have been in the same position. What makes Greece’s problems more difficult to address is the structure of the eurozone: monetary union implies that member states cannot devalue their way out of trouble, yet the modicum of European solidarity that must accompany this loss of policy flexibility simply is not there....

When companies go bankrupt, a debt-equity swap is a fair and efficient solution. The analogous approach for Greece is to convert its current bonds into GDP-linked bonds. If Greece does well, its creditors will receive more of their money; if it does not, they will get less. Both sides would then have a powerful incentive to pursue pro-growth policies.

This short paper by Marcel Fratzscher, Christoph Steffen and Malte Rieth of DIW Berlin lays out how GDP-linked debt might work.

The Greek government's proposals are along the same lines, according to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's article:

The proposals offer a bond swap to ease the debt burden – 177pc of GDP - without demanding an explicit writedown of Greece’s foreign loans. This allows both sides to save face. The aim is to slash Greece’s primary budget surplus from the troika target of 4.5pc of GDP to around 1.5pc to pay for welfare pledges and boost investment. “This gives us a reasonable buffer. The old target is ludicrous,” Mr Varoufakis said.

Loans from the EU bailout machinery would be replaced by GDP-linked bonds, akin to Keynes’s "Bisque Bonds" in the 1930s. Money owed to the ECB would convert into “perpetual bonds”.

The Times' Eduardo Porter reminds us that economists foresaw that the euro might not work out so well:

The euro had been enshrined in a treaty but not yet come to life in the autumn of 1997, when Martin Feldstein, the influential president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, published an essay arguing that European leaders’ hopes that a monetary union would foster greater harmony and peace in a Continent repeatedly ravaged by wars were misplaced.

It “would be more likely to lead to increased conflicts,” wrote Mr. Feldstein, a former chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

War within Europe, “would be abhorrent but not impossible,” he added. “The conflicts over economic policies and interference with national sovereignty could reinforce longstanding animosities based on history, nationality and religion.”

The real difficulty is politics, not economics; as Porter writes:

Fixing this is not impossible. The most direct way would be for the creditors in Europe’s north to relax the tight conditions on debtor countries, provide them with debt relief and allow them to spend more to kick-start growth. Alternatively, they might just invest more themselves, which would lead to higher wages and prices at home, encouraging more output in their poorer neighbors.

This path presents some political complications, however. Voters in Germany and other rich northern countries have no appetite for transfering resources to the vulnerable neighbors around Europe’s edge. And, comfortably insulated by their own prosperity and conditioned by memories of hyperinflation after World War I, they still fear higher inflation. Even the direst warnings of impending doom seem unlikely to shift the public mood.

And that sets the political constraint on the other end of the field. “The right policies would defuse the political crisis in the peripheral countries at the expense of intensifying it in Germany,” Mr. De Grauwe said. “It would prevent communists taking over in the south but would fuel the extreme right in the north.”

As we've seen in the US, the right policies to deal with financial crises and depressions do not appeal to most people's moral intuition, and are thus very difficult politically.  If the euro - and the project of European unity - is to be saved, it will take some courage on the part of the leaders in Germany and other "northern" countries.

Update: the embedded video was taken down, but a shorter version is available at the link.

October Employment

A good report today from the BLS on employment in October:  the unemployment rate fell to 5.8% (from 5.9%) and employers' payrolls rose by 218,000.

The payroll figure comes from a survey of firms, while the unemployment rate is based on a survey of households (which has a smaller sample than the employer survey).  The household survey figures look even better: the number of people employed rose by 683,000, and the number unemployed fell by 267,000.  The labor force (i.e., people who are working or looking for work) rose by 416,000, which put the labor force participation rate at 62.8%, an increase from last month's historic low of 62.7%. 

The decline in labor force participation (which was at 66% in late 2007) has been one of the worrying trends of the past several years.  It partly reflects demographics, though, as the population is becoming older and a larger portion of the population is of retirement age.  Looking at the employment-population ratio for 25-54 year olds gives a picture of the labor market that takes out some of the guesswork in interpreting participation:

This ratio increased from 76.7 to 76.9 in October.  Overall, it shows some recovery over the past three years, but also gives an indication of why many Americans remain unhappy with the state of the economy - it is still less than halfway back from its low point to its pre-recession level.

Moreover, while employment is improving, wages are still growing slowly - the BLS reports that average hourly wages have increased 2% over the past year.  This suggests that there is still plenty of "slack" in the labor market.

The BLS' broader measure of un- and under-employment, 'U-6', which includes the "marginally attached" and people working part-time who want to be full-time, is at 11.5%, down from 11.8% last month (it peaked at 17.2% in April 2010).

August Employment

According to the BLS, employment rose by 142,000 in August and the unemployment rate ticked down to 6.1%.

That's consistent with the picture of a continuing, but painfully slow, recovery that has predominated over the past several years, though this particular report was a little on the disappointing side.

The employment figure comes from a survey of firms, while the unemployment rate is based on a survey of households, which has a smaller sample.  According to the household survey, 80,000 fewer people were unemployed, but only 16,000 more were working - the difference is accounted for by 64,000 departures from the labor force (i.e., adults who are working or looking for work).  Such decreases in labor force participation are not an encouraging sign.

However, labor force participation is a little bit difficult to interpret because demographic change (more people reaching retirement age, etc.) plays a role as well.  My preferred measure of the state of the labor market is the share of 25-54 year-olds who are working - this takes out the guesswork about demographics and participation.  This measure rose in August, to 76.8% (from 76.4%)

that's up from a low of 74.8% in November 2010, but still well below pre-recession levels.  Employment is continuing to crawl out of the hole we dug in 2008-09, but we're less than halfway there.  Any talk of returning to "normal" monetary policy seems a premature to me - things may be getting slightly better, but the situation is still quite bad.

DSGE Failing the Market Test?

The prevailing methodology of macroeconomic theory these days is "Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium" (DSGE) modelling.  Although many contemporary DSGE models, including the ones I'm working on, include "Keynesian" elements such as sticky prices, unemployment and financial frictions, they represent a methodological break with an older style of "Keynesian" models based on relationships among aggregate variables.  The shift in method followed from the work of Lucas and Sargent (most prominently among others) -- which John Cochrane summarized on his blog:

As I see it, the main characteristic of "equilibrium" models Lucas and Sargent inaugurated is that they put people, time, and economics into macro.

Keynesian models model aggregates. Consumption depends on income. Investment depends on interest rates. Labor supply and demand depend on wages. Money demand depends on income and interest rates. "Consumption" and "investment" and so forth are the fundamental objects to be modeled.

"Equilibrium" models (using Lucas and Sargent's word) model people and technology. People make simultaneous decisions across multiple goods, constrained by budget constraints -- if you consume more and save more, you must work more, or hold less money.  Firms  make decisions across multiple goods constrained by technology.

Putting people and their simultaneous decisions back to the center of the model generates Lucas and Sargent's main econometric conclusion -- Sims' "incredible" identifying restrictions. When people simultaneously decide consumption, saving, labor supply, then the variables describing each must spill over in to the other. There is no reason for leaving (say) wages out of the consumption equation. But the only thing distinguishing one equation from another is which variables get left out.

People make decisions thinking about the future. I think "static" vs. "intertemporal" are good words to use.  That observation goes back to Friedman: consumption depends on permanent income, including expected future income, not today's income. Decisions today are inevitably tied to expectations --rational or not -- about the future.

A Bloomberg View column by Noah Smith nicely summarizes the methodological shift, which gained momentum from the apparent breakdown of the Phillips curve relationship between inflation and unemployment in the 1970s.  Smith writes:

Lucas showed that trying to boost gross domestic product by raising inflation might be like the tail trying to wag the dog. To avoid that kind of mistake, he and his compatriots declared, macroeconomists needed to base their models on things that wouldn’t change when government policy changed -- things like technology, or consumer preferences. And so DSGE was born. (DSGE also gave macroeconomists a chance to use a lot of cool new math tricks, which probably increased its appeal.)

OK, history lesson over. So why is this important now?

Well, for one thing, the finance industry has ignored DSGE models. That could be a big mistake! Suppose you’re a macro investor. If all you want to do is make unconditional forecasts -- say, GDP next quarter – then you can go ahead and use an old-style SEM model, because you only care about correlation, not causation. But suppose you want to make a forecast of the effect of a government policy change -- for example, suppose you want to know how the Fed’s taper will affect growth. In that case, you need to understand causation -- you need to know whether quantitative easing is actually changing people’s behavior in a predictable way, and how.

This is what DSGE models are supposed to do. This is why academic macroeconomists use these models. So why doesn’t anyone in the finance industry use them? Maybe industry is just slow to catch on. But with so many billions upon billions of dollars on the line, and so many DSGE models to choose from, you would think someone at some big bank or macro hedge fund somewhere would be running a DSGE model. And yet after asking around pretty extensively, I can’t find anybody who is.

That's an interesting question -- when thinking about issues like this, I often come back to the divide between "science" and "engineering" put forward by Greg Mankiw.  While academic macroeconomics has gone down the path marked out Lucas and Sargent, the policymaking "engineers" in Washington often still find the older-style models more useful.  It sounds like Wall Street's economists do too. 

The question is whether academic macroeconomics is on track to produce models that are more useful for the policymakers and moneymakers. The DSGE method is still fairly new, and, until recently, we've been constrained by the limitations of our computers as well as our minds (a point Narayana Kocherlakota made here), so maybe we're just not quite there yet.  But we should be open to the possibility that we're on the wrong track entirely.

GDP in the Rear-View Mirror

appears smaller than it did before --  the BEA's "third estimate" of real GDP growth came in at -2.9% annual rate.  That's really bad, and a big revision from the "advance estimate" in April of 0.1% growth, and the "second estimate" in May of -1%.

One of the things I emphasize to my students are the limitations of GDP statistics.  One of the difficulties in using them is that they are subject to substantial revisions, that come in with considerable lags.  Policymakers - and anyone else trying to judge the state of the economy - are looking at noisy, backward-looking data. 

Here it is, just past the summer solstice, that we learn that GDP last winter (Jan. - Mar.) was dropping at its fastest rate since 2009 (the first quarter of 2011 is only one other quarter since the recession with declining GDP).  The rate of decline in the 1st quarter was worse than either of the two quarters with negative growth in the 2001 recession.

Although there are usually some changes, this particular revision was unusually large - the change from the initial to the third estimate was the largest since the BEA began releasing estimates this way in the mid-1980's.

The prevailing theory on why the first-quarter was so bad appears to be that it was mainly due to unusually severe weather; although the data are "seasonally adjusted" to account for the fact that some types of economic activity normally are lower in January and February - this winter may have been worse than most.

As Neil Irwin and CEA Chair Jason Furman both note, other indicators - like employment - looked ok during the same period.  Payroll growth averaged 190,000 during the first three months of the year.  That, as Justin Wolfers explains, means a large deviation from the historic relationship between unemployment and output growth known as "Okun's Law".  It also implies a big drop in productivity as we measure it.

A Definition of Business Cycles

Our traditional term for macroeconomic fluctuations - "business cycles" - doesn't really represent well how we think about them now.  Robert Solow provides a good definition:

“the business cycle” has become shorthand for the series of irregular, short-run, aggregative fluctuations of varying duration, magnitude, and—probably—causation that we call prosperity and recession.

That's from Solow's delightful 2007 review of Thomas McCraw's biography of Joseph Schumpeter, which I had the good fortune to stumble upon.

The NBER's somewhat mushy "official" definition is here.

Cassidy on Keynes and Reagan

Econ 302 midterm question 2(a):

The fiscal policies enacted by the Reagan administration included significant cuts in taxes and increases in (military) spending. Illustrate the effects of this fiscal policy using an IS-LM diagram. 

While my students were asked to work out the results in (Keynesian) theory, the data are consistent with its prediction:

The red line (right-hand scale) is GDP growth, which is negative in 1982, but strongly positive in 1983 and 84 ('Morning in America'), and the blue line is the federal deficit as a percentage of potential GDP, which shows the effect of Reagan's fiscal policy.

Apropos of this, John Cassidy has a nice post arguing that Reagan was a closet Keynesian:

In strict terms, Reagan’s neglect of the deficit wasn’t Keynesian. Keynes himself believed in letting the deficit rise in a recession and paying down debts in the good times. In America, though, Keynesianism has always been associated with stimulus programs, big government, and deprioritizing the deficit. In all of these ways, Reagan was a Keynesian. But a word to the wise: don’t waste your time trying to tell that to anybody in the Republican Party.

GDP and Employment: Mixed Messages

This week's Employment and GDP releases sent some very mixed - even more than usual - signals about the economy.

The good: Employment rose by 288,000 in April which is above the average of 194,000 since January 2012, and the February and March employment growth estimates were revised upward slightly.

The bad: The unemployment rate fell from 6.7% to 6.3%, but this was because the labor force fell by 806,000, which puts the labor force participation rate at 62.8%, down 0.4 pts from March (unemployment is measured as a fraction of the "labor force" which includes people who are working or say that they are looking for work, so this means that fewer people were looking for work).  The unemployment rate is calculated from a survey of households which has a smaller sample than the establishment survey that generates the payroll employment figure; in the household survey, the number of people employed fell by 73,000.  The decline in the labor force was attributed to fewer entrants rather than people exiting, as reported by Annalyn Kurtz of CNN:

"The drop in participation is not due to discouraged workers leaving the labor force," a Department of Labor spokesperson noted, "it's due to re-entrants and new entrants who we expected to see flowing into the labor force, and who didn't this month." 

The ugly: Wednesday's advance estimate from the BEA put real GDP growth at an 0.1% annual rate for the first quarter.  Consumption grew at a 3 percent rate; the biggest drag was investment, which fell at a 6.1% rate (mainly due to declines in equipment and housing investment as well as a decrease in inventories, which is counted as a negative investment), and exports, which declined at a 7.6% pace.

Furthermore, yesterday, Ylan Mui of the Washington Post reported that there are some reasons to expect a downward revision:

[T]he Census Bureau released new data on construction spending that were weaker than not only the consensus forecast  but also the government’s estimates in its calculations of the nation’s gross domestic product. Ben Herzon of Macroeconomic Advisers said core construction -- which doesn’t include residential improvements and federal spending -- was soft in March, while the numbers for the first two months of the year were revised lower.

According to Macroeconomic Advisers’ analysis, that means instead of the 0.2 percent boost in private nonresidential construction spending assumed in the GDP calculation, there was likely a 5.7 percent decline. Ouch.

In addition, new data show retail sales were also slightly softer than expected, translating into a 2.9 percent increase in consumer spending instead of a 3 percent rise, Herzon said.

Overall, the mixed signals highlight one of the reasons why "fine tuning" macroeconomic policies are difficult (at best): the "recognition lag" in identifying changes in the state of the economy.  Economic statistics are backward looking, based on surveys (which means there's some statistical "noise" - there's a great illustration of this at The Upshot), and subject to substantial revision.  Right now, the GDP figures look like a recession warning sign, but the employment numbers are consistent with the (slow) recovery continuing on.  Of the data we have so far, the payroll employment figures are probably the most reliable.  Average growth was 190,000 jobs over the first three months of the year, so despite the construction and retail sales data noted above, I'd expect the GDP figure ultimately to be revised upwards. We'll get the "second estimate" on May 29.

Update (5/4): According to Danielle Kurtzleben of Vox, Labor Secretary Perez has a theory about why labor force entry was low:

"What we tend to see, and this is my operating hypothesis of what's going on, this time of year we traditionally expect to see certain types of people flowing into the workforce, and those people are seasonal workers," he says.

The people seeking out that seasonal work start to ramp up their searches later in the month of April, he says. However, the survey week in which the government asks US households whether people are working fell as early as it possibly could have last month.

That's because the household survey week is the calendar week in which the 12th of the month falls. But the 12th landed on a Saturday, meaning households were surveyed from April 6-12.

"The people we would traditionally expect to see flowing into the workforce at this time have not yet entered the workforce," he says.

Been Down So Long (HP Filter Edition)

it looks above-trend to me...

I'm teaching my advanced students about "Real Business Cycles" this week, and, as part of the set up I'm introducing them to the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, a widely-used method of separating "cyclical" from "trend" components of time series data, like US GDP.  I recently updated my example - the red line is US real GDP, which tends upwards, with occasional interruption, and the blue line is the trend, according to HP filter:

When we study "business cycles" we're studying the deviations of real GDP (red) from its trend (blue) path (the trend is the subject of economic growth theory).

The striking thing is at the end, where filter shows GDP above its trend path.  This is clearer if we pull out the deviations:

These are the business cycles captured by this method, and you can see at the end, the distance from trend is positive.

So, we're "above trend"?  Economy's not so bad after all?!

Well, not really... the way the HP filter works is that it chooses a trend that minimizes the distance between the trend and the underlying data, subject to a constraint limiting the change in the growth rate of the trend, which is what forces it to be smooth.  The US economy's slump was deep and long enough that it pulled down the trend far enough that we're now a little above it.

Here is the growth rate of the trend:

You can see how much, according to the filter, the last several years pulled down the trend path.

I'm not sure whether this says more about the economy or the de-trending method (there's a whole literature on technical issues in de-trending...).  But it does remind us that we need to be careful in how we use our tools and interpret their results (i.e., we should actually look at the graphs).

A somewhat different picture, which is more consistent with what most of us think is the state of "the economy" is given by comparing real GDP to the CBO's estimate of "potential output":

That is, we still have a long way to go to close our "output gap".

March Employment

The BLS released the employment figures for March today - a fairly good report overall, consistent with the trend that has predominated over the past several years of an economy that is recovering, but far too slowly.

Nonfarm payrolls - the jobs number from the survey of firms - rose by 192,000.  The unemployment rate remained at 6.7%, but in the survey of households which is used to calculate it, employment rose by 476,000.  The reason the unemployment rate didn't fall is that the labor force - i.e., the number of people working, or looking for work, increased by 503,000.  The decline in labor force participation has been one of the most troubling figures over the past several years, so it is good to see it rising again - in March, it rose 0.2 to 63.2%.

 The employment-population ratio for people 25-54 also rose by 0.2 percentage points, to 76.7%.

Looking at this statistic provides a rough way to control for the effects of the changing age distribution of the population.  While it has shown improvement recently, its still considerably below its all time high of 81.9% from April 2000.

Overall, while the report was somewhat encouraging, 10.5 million people remain unemployed.  The broader measure of un- and under-employment, 'U-6', which counts discouraged workers and part-time workers who would prefer to be full time, is at 12.7%.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the unemployment rate was 7.2%, down from 7.5% in February, and payrolls rose by 941,000 (i.e., March is a month that normally sees a big employment gain, which is removed by the seasonal adjustment).