Five intriguing papers I discovered this week II

As the second in a series, here are summaries of five interesting journal articles I read in the last week. All of these ones are new, although that may not always be the case. 1. "Very Long-Run Discount Rates" by Stefano Giglio, Matteo Maggiori and Johannes Stroebel

Giglio et al. use the difference between the prices of leasehold and freehold properties in the UK and Singapore to compute long-run discount rates. They find that over 100 years, the discount rate is 2.6%—whereas properties with 700-year or longer leases trade at par with freeholds. They point out that this 2.6% discount rate may have implications for climate change policy; the famous and influential Stern Review recommended using a 0% discount rate, which may justify much more extensive anti-CO2 measures now. Some slides explaining their findings are available here.

2. "Is the stock market just a side show? Evidence from a structural reform" by Murillo Campello, Rafael P. Ribas, and Albert Wang

Campello et al. look at a 2005 reform that, in a staggered 16-month basis and after a trial, allowed $400bn worth of Chinese equity, previously untradable, to be bought and sold. Using "wrinkles" in the roll out that provide quasi-experimental tests, they find that firm profitability, productivity, investment and value all improved substantially. "Policies that ease restrictions on [capital] markets may have positive effects" runs the final line of their conclusion—quelle surprise!

3. "Social security programs and retirement around the world: Disability insurance programs and retirement" by Courtney Coile, Kevin S. Milligan and David A. Wise

These three authors add to the burgeoning literature proving that those on the edge of retirement respond to incentives just like anyone else. This shouldn't really be a surprise, but the heavy flow of publications adding evidence in this direction suggests that maybe there was once a bizarre consensus in the other direction. Coile et al. show that delaying eligibility to pensions, increasing the stringency of disability insurance programs, and other welfare reforms for older people have "very large" effects on how much labour they decide to supply. Not exactly shocking, but certainly important in ageing societies.

4. "What Happens When Employers are Free to Discriminate? Evidence from the English Barclays Premier Fantasy Football League" by Alex Bryson and Arnaud Chevalier

In this nifty and quirky paper the authors try and isolate "taste-based" racial discrimination, by looking if fantasy football players pick footballers differently based on their race, controlling for "productivity" (i.e. their expected points tally). They find no evidence of taste-based discrimination here, suggesting that much of the apparent discrimination found in other studies (e.g. studies of fake CVs where different ethnicities see different acceptance rates even when they have similar qualifications and experience) could be statistical. That is, since employers cannot directly observe productivity (unlike in fantasy football), and since different ethnicities have different productivity distributions, certain ethnicities are on average less valuable to employers. Of course, it might be that people exercise taste-based discrimination as well when they have to interact regularly with the group/race/ethnicity in question—fantasy football is much more at arms length.

5. "The Role of Publicly Provided Electricity in Economic Development: The Experience of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1929–1955" by Carl Kitchens (ungated)

The most fun kind of research to read is one that confirms a niggling view you've had for a while, but one that nevertheless overturns a happy consensus. The Tennessee Valley Authority is a classic example of "enlightened" central planning, targeting a hard-up area with massive coordinated infrastructural investment and widely believed to have delivered substantial benefits. But if these dams and systems were really such good investments wouldn't private companies have got around all the barriers to such an investment already? There are some cases where I suppose that sort of basic argument doesn't hold, but it's a pretty good first approach to any area, and it turns out the TVA is one of them. Kitchens newly-published paper finds "that the development of the TVA during its first 30 years did not cause manufacturing, retail sales per capita or electrification to grow any faster in areas receiving TVA electricity than in other areas in the Southeast."

Ignore the doomsayers: The recovery is real

Some commentators claim that the UK’s current economic recovery is illusory. They say that the recovery is based on an artificial boom fuelled by loose money and will eventually come crashing down to earth. I think it is very likely that this view is wrong, for at least two reasons. One, the UK does not have loose money that would fuel a credit boom. Two, the best tool we have for telling if the recovery is ‘real’ or not is the market. And the market is telling us that it sees things as looking good.

The idea that we have loose money is extremely common. It is based on the assumption that a Bank of England base rate of 0.5%, historically very low, must mean that money is loose. This is what Milton Friedman referred to as the ‘interest rate fallacy’. It is a fallacy because it fails to ask the key question: ‘compared to what?’

That ‘what’ is, or ought to be, the ‘neutral rate of interest’ – the interest rate where, in David Beckworth’s words, “monetary policy is neither too simulative nor too contractionary and is pushing the economy toward its full potential.” The tightness of money is determined by the central bank rate relative to the neutral rate. If the neutral rate of interest is lower than the base rate, then money is tight.

Is the neutral rate of interest in the UK currently above or below 0.5%? It's hard to say. Milton Friedman pointed out that usually low rates were a sign of tight, not easy money. This is because low rates almost always coincide with very low inflation, nominal GDP growth and money growth—which Friedman pointed out were much better ways of assessing the stance of policy.

It’s possible to infer from things like NGDP growth (well-below trend until recently) that money has been unusually tight. NGDP growth seems to be returning to the trend rate, if not the trend level, that it was before the crisis. People calling ‘easy money’ may disagree, but if they are simply pointing to low interest rates without trying to compare them to the neutral rate, they’re not proving anything at all.

But even if it’s not down to easy money, maybe the recovery really does sit upon a throne of lies that will inevitably collapse. How could we tell?

Since the world is very, very complex, it is unlikely that one individual expert or panel of experts will be able to possess all the information they would need to make reliable predictions about the future.

Where possible, we should prefer the ‘wisdom of crowds’. And we have something that can do so very effectively: the market. And the market seems pretty optimistic: the FTSE 100 is growing strongly; firms are taking on new staff; gilt yields are extremely low.

Second-guessing the market is particularly unusual for people on the right of the political spectrum. As Josh Barro put it recently, “A conservative is somebody who thinks every market is efficient — except the Treasury bond market.” (A point worth remembering next time you read about the UK's "looming debt crisis".)

Of course markets can get things wrong. There is a high degree of uncertainty involved in all predictions like this. But, given a choice between the aggregated judgement of millions of market participants, all bringing their local knowledge to bear, and the judgment of a few experts, I’ll go with the market.

In summary, there’s no reason to think that either we have excessively loose money or that the recovery is illusory. Note that mine is an entirely negative argument – I am not claiming that money is too tight, or just right, nor am I claiming that markets are correct. I'm saying that, given the information we have available to us, we should resist the urge to doomsay. In short: don't worry, be happy.

What's a neutral monetary policy?

The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond alerted me to a newish paper from one of my favourite economists, Robert Hetzel, entitled "The Monetarist-Keynesian Debate and the Phillips Curve: Lessons from the Great Inflation"—needless to say it's highly interesting and informative. One bit in particular prompted me to write this screed on neutrality in central banking and monetary policy.

In the Keynesian tradition, cyclical fluctuations arise from real shocks in the form of discrete shifts in the degree of investor optimism and pessimism about the future large enough to overwhelm the stabilising properties of the price system and, by extension, to overwhelm the monetary stimulus evidenced by cyclically low interest rates.

In the quantity theory [monetarist] tradition, cyclical fluctations rise from central bank behaviour that frustrates the working of the price system through monetary shocks that require changes in individual relative prices to reach, on average, a new price level in a way uncoordinated by a common set of expectations.

In the real-business-cycle [new classical] tradition, cyclical fluctuations arise from productivity shocks passed on to the real economy through a well-functioning price system devoid of monetary non-neutralities and nominal price stickiness.

From each of these perspectives, we can derive some sort of definition of monetary/central bank neutrality, as well as an idea of what policy the central bank should operate. It strikes me that only one view is plausible, but before I make the case for that view, I will make the case for a particular theory of "meta-neutrality", i.e. a way that we should think about neutrality, whatever our perspective. I think this is something that everyone should be able to agree on, but I think that once we've agreed on it one view becomes inescapable.

Nothing is neutral with respect to everything. In one of my favourite ever essays, Scott Alexander makes a very similar point about "safe spaces" (nothing can be a safe space for everything—safe spaces for, e.g. a safe space for a disadvantaged group cannot also be a safe space for no-holds-barred rational discussion). In the same way, a monetary policy that is neutral with respect to real interest rates might conceivably have to achieve this by non-neutrality with respect to say, exchange rates. So the interesting question is what economic variables monetary policy must be neutral with respect to for us to call it "neutral" with no qualifiers.

But what we really want to be neutral to is the microeconomic working of the price system and markets generally, which is a bit more complex than any particular macroeconomic variable we could point to. One way around the question is by thinking about what might be non-neutral to the workings of the price system. One answer is: menu and shoe-leather costs, typically associated with high inflation, but more accurately linked to high aggregate demand (nominal GDP) growth.

Both impose restrictions on price adjustment, especially if they are unexpected and hence not "priced in".Menu costs will stop firms re-pricing things as often as would be optimal, impeding price adjustment, whileshoe-leather costs (from the high nominal interest rates associated with high inflation and high NGDP growth) will stop people from holding as much cash as they otherwise would, distorting their consumption decisions.

On the other side, unexpectedly low NGDP growth, combined with "money illusion" in borrowers ("sticky debts") and workers ("sticky wages"), could cause other microeconomic problems—markets won't clear until people's information, expectations and plans have adjusted, i.e. until people realise that the fall in prices/wages is not a relative price adjustment but a fall in overall prices/NGDP.

Overall this suggests we should call a policy neutral without qualifiers not when it is perfectly neutral (which is impossible) but when it is the "neutrality maximising policy". In the words of David Beckworth "neither too stimulative nor too contractionary and is pushing the economy toward its full potential" or in the words of Alan Greenspan one that "would keep the economy at its production potential over time".

That is, one that balances the distortionary costs of high (particularly unexpectedly high) NGDP growth with the costs of low (particularly unexpectedly low) NGDP growth. Empirically, menu cost and shoe leather problems have never been large in the USA and UK when NGDP is ticking along at about 5%. By contrast, NGDP growth less than 2.5% is almost always consonant with stagnation, while NGDP growth of less than zero always means a recession—much bigger costs. This suggests policy, far from being unprecedentedly easy in the lacklustre post-recession recovery, was if anything on the tight side of neutral.

Two crucial final points:

1. Identifying the conditions that we'd want to see in the macroeconomy for a (relatively) undistorted microeconomy does not mean endorsing a particular monetary arrangement or regime. Whether we have a central bank or not, we'd want stable NGDP growth.

2. This 5% level is contingent on society-wide expectations. If long-term expectations held by borrowers, lenders, firms, consumers and workers were for 0% NGDP growth (e.g. the 19th Century), then 0% NGDP growth would be more likely to be the neutrality-maximising monetary policy.

Why Labour's rent controls will do more harm than good

Now that we have more detail, Labour’s new ‘rent control’ policy is not quite as bad as I'd initially feared. Instead of the old school price ceilings that destroyed parts of New York City, Labour are proposing ‘second-generation rent controls’, which limit the ability of landlords to renegotiate rents during tenancies, and ‘make three-year tenancies the norm’.

The real-world effects of this are likely to be that expected rent increases over the three-year lease will be priced in to the starting rent, so it’s unlikely to actually make anyone better off unless there’s an unexpected increase in rents. If rents fall below expectations, this would hurt tenants.

Since landlords are bound within tenancy agreements, rises in rents are likely to be sharper than they currently are for new tenants. This means that housing mobility is likely to be reduced – tenants locked in to a relatively low rent will find it more costly than they otherwise would to move. This is very important: it looks as if lowered housing mobility causes higher unemployment, because people are less able to move to find new jobs.

Rent controls of any kind are likely to decrease the supply and quality of available housing. ‘Second-generation’ controls are less tight and so less harmful than classical rent controls, but as Hopi Sen has pointed out, the German experience does not seem encouraging. There, rents have risen far more quickly over the past decade than they have in Britain, as new construction has slowed.

There is also evidence to suggest that second-generation rent controls have a similarly negative impact on housing quality as classical rent controls. A 1985 study by the Richmond Fed found that controlled housing units were 7.1% lower in quality in 1974, and 13.5% lower in 1977, pointing to a cumulative negative effect. If classical rent controls are only worse than bombing, second-generation controls may be close to petty vandalism.

One interesting aspect of this announcement is that it may affect supply now, as would-be investors in new housing are discouraged by the prospect of stricter controls on their investment. If the measures are actually brought in – crossing the rent control Rubicon – an expectation of tighter controls may reduce supply even more.

It’s not clear what mechanism Labour is proposing to make three-year tenancies ‘the norm’, but it’s hard to imagine any effective measure that would not end up hurting tenants who want shorter leases. This probably means young people.

As we say virtually every day, the best way to reduce the cost of housing is to build more. Labour’s proposals seem counter-productive, but they’re nothing compared to the harm caused by the planning system.

We recently learned that more of Surrey is covered by golf courses than by houses. Rolling the green belt out even a bit – by, say, a mile outside London – would create space for hundreds of thousands of new homes, relieving pressure on existing housing stock, reducing rents and – a nice bonus – creating lots of jobs and adding a few percentage points on to GDP growth. We can dream.

Three steps forward

In today's City AM I outline a fairly simple growth agenda that would, I think, deliver very strong growth without requiring tax cuts (which are very important, but seem to be politically dead in the water right now). My three items are reform of planning, immigration and money (the 'PIMs', as I call them), by rolling back the green belt outside London, allowing high-skilled immigration, and targeting NGDP instead of inflation:

Whisper it, but things finally seem to be looking up. Investment is rising, unemployment is falling, and the deficit seems to be coming under control. But it could be a lot better. Real wages will not recover to their pre-crisis peak until 2020. And expected growth of 2.7 per cent this year is well below what we might expect in a real recovery.

The question is, how can we get the strong growth we all want? Tax cuts are nice, but hard to sell as long as the deficit remains large. And calls for business deregulation are often too vague to be useful. But there are clear areas for reform in planning, immigration, and money, and none would threaten the deficit. Reform these areas – the PIMs, we might call them – and real, booming, sustainable growth will come.

Read the whole thing.

Was there really a Cuban Missile Crisis?

Lars Christensen, aka the market monetarist, has a great post over at his blog on whether or not the Cuban Missile Crisis should really have been so worrying. A stupid question, you might think, but he shows that the equity markets did not crash anything like as much as they would have been expected to do if a true catastrophe was likely.

What really happened, however, was that S&P500 didn’t drop – it flatlined during the 13 days in October 1962 the stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union lasted. That to me is pretty remarkable given what could have happened.

Why didn't the markets think the world was going to be destroyed—and with it the value of big companies. Why didn't investors rush to put all their money in gold, underground bunkers, canned goods and guns?

There might be a number of reasons why we didn’t see a stock market collapse during the standard-off. Some have argued that the crisis was an example of what have been called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Both the US and Soviet Union knew that there would be no winners in a nuclear conflict and therefore none of them would have an incentive to actual start a nuclear war. It might be that investors realised this and while the global media was reporting on the risk of the outbreak of the third World War they were not panicking (contrary to popular believe stock markets are a lot less prone to panic than policy makers).

Another possibility is of course that the markets knew better than the Kennedy administration about the geopolitical risks prior to the crisis. Hence, the stock market had already fallen more than 20% in the months prior to Kennedy administration’s announced that the Soviet Union was putting up a nuclear missiles in Cuba.

And it's worth reminding those who are sceptical what actually happened.

And the market was of course right – there was not third World War and after 13 days of tense stand-off the crisis ended.

For more commentary, read Pete Spence at City A.M. and the rest of Lars' post.

Should the government play the markets?

A recent report from the National Audit Office found that the government could have made £750m more from the sale of Royal Mail if it had sold at the highest price the shares reached on its first day. This has led many to blame the government for selling off the family silver at the bottom of the market. Others have pointed outthat the reason for privatising Royal Mail was to subject it to the disciplines of the market, not to raise money. And that no one knows in advance what a share will be worth. Grey markets undervalued the share as well—and of course some advisers said it would rise higher, just as others said it wouldn't. Perhaps government politicking prior to the sale caused some of the problems. In any case, the value has not disappeared, it has just been distributed differently. There may be weak reasons to question the profile of the distribution (e.g. will it be spent more progressively or efficiently by government?) but realistically we're talking a small amount of the budget and bear in mind that investors who ordered more than £10,000 of shares were shut out completely. But one interesting angle is whether this is like Gordon Brown's gold "sell-off" of 1999-2002. As everyone remembers, Brown, as chancellor of the exchequer, sold off the government's gold at what turned out to be the bottom of the market, losing out on potential gains easily ten times more than available with Royal Mail. He is widely criticised for this, but I can't quite see why. I can't think of any good reason why the government should hold any assets whatsoever. On top of this, there are at least four reasons why the state should not hold any specific assets:

1. The government is not well placed to play asset markets. So there's an interesting question as to whether the government should hold net wealth. Maybe there are shocks where easy sources of income will evaporate and the government will need to instantly liquidate some assets in order to pay its normal bills, defend the country against external aggressors, enforce the law etc. This might suggest the government needs to hold net wealth. But we know that even very smart and knowledgeable fund managers with all the right incentives only consistently outperform the market due to luck. So what would make us think, outside of one issue I'll deal with later, that the government's agents, so universally derided for competence in most contexts, could succeed in this either impossible or just really really really hard task? The UK government's Royal Mail and gold holdings were vastly out of proportion to those assets' size in relation to all wealth. If the government wants to hold wealth we know that it should hold a low cost exchange-tracker, as broad-based as possible. Otherwise it will effectively be handing over taxpayer wealth to traders in the markets.

2. Playing asset markets may directly distort those markets. If governments hold given assets (e.g. Royal Mail shares or gold) then it might be because there are social welfare reasons for doing so. It's at least possible that people have the specific desire for the equity of companies to not be held privately or to be held by the state and this something worth at least factoring in. When it comes to gold then individuals might be glad the government has it as a backstop. And of course the state could just be holding these assets on behalf of its citizens, perhaps because there are economies of scale in so doing. Even if there aren't benefits to the state holding assets on behalf of citizens, individuals may take these holdings into account as if they were their own, thus causing only small inefficiencies. But I take most of these considerations to be of minuscule empirical importance. Mainly the government's holdings of assets cannot be justified by these reasons. But since the market will be influenced by their holdings, they will reduce the supply of certain sorts of assets for the market to hold, leading to price shifts and portfolio rebalancing. Since this will be away from the ideal portfolio firms would have held (I can imagine exceptions but none of them are relevant here) this reduces social welfare.

3. Government holding assets means they're unlikely to be used with allocative efficiency. This depends on some of the considerations in 2, but again they're very very unlikely to have empirically large impacts. By contrast, there are probably some very empirically large impacts from the fact that few of the government's assets—totting up to about £600bn, according to a recent ASI report—are ever marketed. As we know from Friedrich A. Hayek's most important work, market pricing is how we rationally allocate resources in society. This was why Hayek and Ludwig von Mises won the socialist calculation debate as even noted Marxist G.A. Cohen agreed. What this means for assets is that we don't know whether they are properly used unless we trade for them. An illustration: if the government sold off all its army barracks the army might then rent the selfsame barracks from their private owners. But it's possible that they would rent somewhere else, and someone might set up a factory or a farm or a theme park on the original site. Without the market competition process we have no idea what would happen and we have no idea what the best use of the land and buildings would be. This applies to big nebulous assets like Royal Mail just as it applies to land and as it applies to gold.

4. If the government holds assets it may have incentives that distort its policy-making decisions. Why does the UK have such an appallingly tight planning regime even though basically all economists think it's extremely inefficient and damaging? It's probably because lots of people own houses and these groups tend to be disproportionately likely to vote and are otherwise politically well-connected. If these groups rented their house and owned the same amount of wealth spread across a wide range of assets it's very unlikely we'd see such economically unjustifiable policies. The same goes, potentially, for government-held assets. After all, the government will be blamed not to mention having less ability to achieve its policy goals if assets it holds lose value. It's not so much that they're likely to directly pursue policies designed to boost the value of state assets. But acts of commission are treated differently to those of omission. It seems highly likely that the government will treat policy changes that affect these particular assets' value differently, just like housing.

So maybe the government should hold some wealth, I can see the arguments for and I can imagine some arguments against. But if it holds wealth it ought hold assets as broadly as possible: because it's not placed to take gambles on particular assets; because doing so may distort markets directly; because holding assets takes them off the market and reduces allocative efficiency; and because holding particular assets may distort the incentives facing policymakers. Thus we should praise Gordon Brown for selling off gold just as we should praise Vince Cable and George Osborne for selling off the Royal Mail.

What on earth is Germany doing here?

This looks to me like an extraordinarily silly decision over there in Germany:

BERLIN—Germany's cabinet Wednesday adopted a bill to introduce a statutory pay floor of €8.50 ($11.72) an hour, a change in policy after Europe's largest economy for decades let business groups and trade unions set pay and working times in collective agreements. The measure, which targets the five million German workers who currently earn less than €8.50 an hour, will be introduced in 2015 with a two-year transition period given to existing regional and sector-wide wage deals.

Where do we expect to see the unemployment effects of a minimum wage? Quite, in the unemployment rate of the young, untrained and unskilled. So, what can we note about the youth unemployment rate in Germany, given that up until now it hasn't had a minimum wage that bites? Yes, quite, we can see that it's very low compared to that of other European countries.

What do we expect to happen with the introduction of a minimum wage, especially one this high? That the youth unemployment rate will start to look more like that of other European countries of course.

Oh, and Germany also has another problem:

Government officials have said that former East Germany with its lower wage and higher unemployment levels will likely be hit hardest by the new minimum wage.

Yup. Just doesn't look like a sensible decision to me.

Video: the state of the minimum wage debate

Last month I spoke on the minimum wage at LibertarianHome's meet-up, and they have uploaded the video of the talk, as well as a very good summary write-up of my comments. I had a great time at the talk and I'm looking forward to attending more of their meet-ups in future.

Higher food prices reduce poverty

It's a general assumption that higher food prices are bad for the poor. Clearly, it must be: the poor, the truly poor that is, spend some 80% of their incomes on food, if the price rises then obviously they must be getting poorer. Thus all that nonsense from the World Development Movement, Oxfam et al, about how food speculation in 2008 drove up food prices, impoverished more and thus we must ban capitalism etc.

Except that's not actually true. Poverty declined in the wake of that 2008 rise in food prices. Which leads us to, via Dani Rodrik, this paper:

Standard microeconomic methods consistently suggest that, in the short run, higher food prices increase poverty in developing countries. In contrast, macroeconomic models that allow for an agricultural supply response and consequent wage adjustments suggest that the poor ultimately benefit from higher food prices. In this paper we use international data to systematically test the relationship between changes in domestic food prices and changes in poverty. We find robust evidence that in the long run (one to five years) higher food prices reduce poverty and inequality. The magnitudes of these effects vary across specifications and are not precisely estimated, but they are large enough to suggest that the recent increase in global food prices has significantly accelerated the rate of global poverty reduction. The policy implications of these findings are therefore nuanced: short-run social protection is justified in the face of high food price volatility, but passing on higher prices to producers in the long run is an important means of reducing poverty in the poorest countries.

The most important word there is that "producers" in that last sentence. The poor in developing countries are the peasant farmers. They're also food producers: thus a rise in food prices benefits them. The mistake being made by those who insist that higher food prices impoverishes further the very poor is to assume that they are net food consumers. But, being peasant farmers, they're not: a peasant household is a net food producer. So of course higher prices will benefit them.

The situation is quiite different for the urban poor, of course, for they are net consumers. But given that the urban poor are richer than those stuck in the idiocy or rural life higher food prices are still poverty and inequality reducing.

All of which leads to an interesting conclusion. Assume that WDM and Oxfam are correct about the effects of food speculation (they're not), also that they both truly desire to reduce poverty and inequality (your options on that are open) then both organisations should be campaigning for there to be more speculation in food commodity markets.

I look forward to the new campaigns.