An Ultraminimalist Model of the Beveridge Curve, or, How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Structural Unemployment

Where do businesses find people to hire?  A few new employees – graduating students, for example – are recruited from outside the labor force, but I’m going to ignore them (as later I will also ignore retirees, figuring that they roughly offset each other).  Most new employees come either from among the unemployed or from other firms.  Hiring the unemployed is easy inasmuch as they’re usually knocking at your door asking for jobs.  On the other hand, the selection process might be difficult, since they aren’t doing a job now, so you have to make an educated guess as to whether they’ll be good at the job for which you’re hiring.  Hiring people from other firms is difficult in that you have to go out and actively recruit them, as well making an offer that justifies leaving their old job, but the selection process is easier, because all you have to do is find someone who is already doing a job similar to the one for which you’re hiring. 

So there is a tradeoff.   Presumably the terms of this tradeoff depend on how many people are unemployed:  if only a few people are unemployed, then the number of qualified unemployed applicants will be low, and they’ll be in demand from other firms, so you’ll have to pay them well, so you might as well just try to poach someone directly from another firm; if a lot of people are unemployed, the number of qualified unemployed applicants will be high, and they’ll be willing to accept less attractive offers, so poaching might not be worth it.  So here’s the crux of my model:  the fraction of new hires that comes from the unemployed depends on how many unemployed there are.  Using “H” for total hires, “He” for “hires out of employment,” and “Hu” for “hires out of unemployment,” we have Hu/H=f(U), where f() is some increasing function, and for adding-up, we have H=He+Hu.

Now, why do people quit their jobs?  Some retire, but I’ve already said I’m going to ignore them.  Some quit for other personal reasons, and I’m going to ignore them too.  A few people quit, especially when the labor market is strong, because they don’t like their job and figure it will be easy enough to find a new one.  I’m also going to ignore them.  Most people who quit, I believe, quit because they already have another job lined up.  In other words, if we ignore all the categories I’m ignoring, then the number of quits equals the total number of new hires minus the number of new hires that are hired out of unemployment, or Q=H-Hu.  Putting this proposition together with the one at the end of the last paragraph and solving simultaneously, we get Q=H*(1-f(U)).

OK, what about layoffs?  It may sound crazy at first, but I’m essentially going to ignore layoffs.  I’m going to assume that they happen at a constant rate.  We do know that layoffs tend to spike during the early part of a recession (or in the case of the recent recession, in the middle, when the “Great Recession” took over from the “little recession” that was already in progress).  But the typical spike is fairly small compared to the total number of layoffs.  (We notice those layoffs more because they result in significant spells of unemployment, whereas non-recession layoffs often result in just changing jobs, or in brief spells of unemployment that often aren’t long enough to justify filing an unemployment claim.)  So the “constant layoffs” assumption isn’t too far from the truth.  Also, layoff spikes are clearly “disequilibrium” phenomena that induce changes in the unemployment rate rather than explaining how a given unemployment rate is maintained.  In thinking about the Beveridge curve, I’m interested in the equilibrium relationship between unemployment and job openings.

And here’s the equilibrium condition.  I’ll ignore longer run changes in the labor force and the capital stock and define equilibrium as constant total employment (which implies constant total unemployment, since I’m ignoring labor force changes).  Constant employment implies that hires equal separations.  I’ll ignore “other separations” and assume all the separations are either quits or layoffs.  Then we have H=Q+L (where L stands for “layoffs,” not “labor”).

Since I’ve assumed that layoffs are constant, we have three variables here, U, H, and Q.  We’re more interested in hires than quits, so we can solve to eliminate Q, and we get H=L /f(U).  Since f() is an increasing function, this gives as an inverse equilibrium relationship between hires and unemployment.

Ultimately we want to relate unemployment to job openings, since that’s what the Beveridge curve is about.  How do hires relate to job openings?  One traditional approach is to fit a “matching function” in which hires are an increasing function of both job openings and unemployment.  The theory is that it should be easier to fill job openings when there are a lot of unemployed people looking for jobs.  I tried fitting such a function using JOLTS data, and the coefficient on unemployment consistently came out with the wrong sign, no matter how many polynomial time trends or dummy variables I put in, and even when I included an interaction term between unemployment and the availability of extended unemployment benefits.  Actually, that result is what motivated this model.  While obviously a high unemployment rate will reduce the number of people who quit their jobs in order to fill job openings, it does not apparently result in those openings being filled any more quickly.  So my matching function is a one-variable function. H=m(V), where V (“vacancies”) is the number of job openings.

Empirically, I fit H=m(V) as H=a*V^b, where a and b are fitted constants.  (Why do I use that form? Tradition, I suppose:  it just seemed reasonable.  It allows for the intuitive special case where b=1, so that job openings fill at a constant rate, but one casual look at the data will tell you that b<1 in reality: openings fill more quickly when there are fewer of them.)  The fit is pretty good (“log V” explains 78% of the variance in “log H” with a slope coefficient of about 0.5, implying that H is proportional to the square root of V), but there is an obvious pattern in the residuals.  (The Durbin-Watson statistic is a mere 0.7 – in case this post isn’t wonkish enough already.)  The cumulative sum of the residuals peaks in July 2006, suggesting that there may be a structural break in August.  A casual look at the residuals strongly suggests another structural break in July 2010.  Both purported structural breaks go in the same direction:  a decline in the number of hires associated with any given number of job openings.  So, contrary to what I said in 2010, it does look like we are seeing more structural unemployment now than in the past.  (In my defense, the first break occurs long before the recession, so I was right to assert that recession had not produced an increase in structural unemployment; and the second break occurs just when I was making that assertion, so I had no data from after the break.)

After I had done all this pseudo-theorizing, I decided to do a little pseudo-test of my pseudo-model, and it actually holds up surprisingly well (allowing the function f(U) to have the same form as m(V), because don’t all functions have that form, damn it!).   There is a nice, linear-looking, downward-sloping relationship between the log of hires and the log of unemployment.  Log unemployment explains almost 90% of the variance in log hires, with a slope coefficient of -0.37, and the coefficients are robust to the inclusion of an ARMA(1,1) residual process that results in a Durbin-Watson statistic of precisely 2.0.  (Ooooh, talk nerdy to me, Baby!)  There is no obvious pattern in the residuals.  Surprisingly, there are only 3 significant outliers (March 2003, November 2008, and May 2010; call them “Iraq War,” “Post-Lehman,” and “Census”).  At least I find that surprising, because this is an equilibrium model of a system that obviously, in real life, is subject to shocks that move it out of equilibrium – as we know from the fact that the unemployment rate changes a lot.  If you take this test at face value, it suggests that the equilibrating forces (which I haven’t tried to model) are very strong.

So what does all this imply about the natural rate of unemployment?  To answer that question we need a model of aggregate supply, and I happen to have one up my sleeve.  Here’s my model:  there’s a constant natural rate of job openings.  That’s it.  If firms have an unusually large number of positions to fill, they bid up wages, and you get accelerating inflation.  If firms have an unusually small number of positions to fill (like right now, but even more like three years ago), they start to let wages erode, and you get decelerating inflation (although research now suggests that it’s very difficult to erode wages that already aren’t rising, so this won’t work very well unless there is some substantial inflation or productivity growth to begin with – but all that belongs in another post).  Somewhere there’s a happy medium rate of job openings, such that wages tend to continue rising at a rate consistent with the expected rate of inflation.  That’s the natural rate of jobs openings.  Or the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Job Openings (NAIRJO).   Or the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Vacancies (NAIRV).

If the relationship between hiring and unemployment is stable, as it appears to be, then my model implies that shifts in the matching function will determine a shifting relationship between the (assumed constant) NAIRV and the NAIRU (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, a.k.a. the natural rate of unemployment).  For what it’s worth, my estimates suggest that the hypothesized August 2006 and July 2010 shifts in the matching function would, collectively, increase the NAIRU by a factor of about one and a third.  So if the NAIRU was 4.5% (my best guess, which happens to be conveniently divisible by 3) in July 2006, it is 6% now.  Of course, by the time the unemployment rate gets down to 6%, there’s a good chance that the matching function will have shifted again, but as for which direction and how far, your guess is as good as mine.

UPDATE: Posted scatter of log hires vs log unemployment on Twitter.

UPDATE2: Posted graph of series hires/sqrt(openings) on Twitter.

DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product. 

Federal Funds and the Paradox of Conditional Promises

The Fed’s Open Market Committee met on Tuesday and issued a statement. What changed in this statement compared to the Fed’s previous statement? Here’s what I think is the most important change. On January 25, the Fed said:

In particular, the Committee decided today to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that economic conditions--including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run--are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through late 2014.

On March 13, the Fed said:

In particular, the Committee decided today to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that economic conditions--including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run--are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through late 2014.

See the change? What, you don’t? You must have forgotten to put on your X-ray vision goggles!

There is a change, but it isn’t visible to the naked eye. At least it’s not visible if you just look at the words. What we have here is a case of the shifting relationship between signifier and signified.

Suppose your spouse calls from work and says, “I’ll be home in two hours.” Then an hour later, your spouse calls again and says, “I’ll be home in two hours.” The words are the same, but the meaning has changed: changed enough, perhaps, to make the difference between a hot dinner and a cold one. The phrase, “in two hours,” is the same, but the time to which it refers has changed.

In the Fed’s statement, what has changed is the referent for the word “conditions.” I just looked at a chart of the Citigroup Economic Surprise Index, and one thing I note is that, for the past six weeks (and for some months before that), it has remained consistently positive, and indeed consistently above +35, indicating that we have been receiving positive economic surprises. A rational forecaster will not be expecting the same conditions between now and 2014 as they had been expecting on January 25. Logically, if the conditions expected today are likely to warrant the same thing as conditions expected in January were likely to warrant, then the Fed must have changed its idea of what kind of conditions would warrant that.

By repeating the language in its earlier statement, the Fed has in effect announced a change in its reaction function. If the Fed had an explicit economic target for the next three years, it would have to change that target in order to continue being consistent with the language in its statement. By apparently doing nothing, the Fed has eased monetary policy.

Now the effect of an easing of monetary policy is that the economy is likely to be stronger than what was likely before the easing. After all, that’s the whole point of easing monetary policy. And that’s where things get tricky.

What does the Fed’s statement, implying that it expects to keep the federal funds rate low, mean about the likely actual future path of the federal funds rate? It means that the federal funds rate is likely to rise sooner than you previously expected. By promising – quite sincerely – to keep the federal funds rate low, the Fed is increasing the chance that the economy will call its bluff and force it to raise the federal funds rate. This is the paradox of a conditional promise.

It’s similar to the argument I made a couple of years ago with respect to bond yields (and which, in that case, the subsequent experience of QE2 seemed to bear out). Somewhat like the way the leader of a cartel can push prices up by threatening to cut prices if anyone defects, a central bank can raise bond yields by threatening to cut them. A similar logic applies to the federal funds rate, even though, in this case, the rate is under the Fed’s (almost) direct control. By specifying a more stringent criterion for raising the rate, the Fed actually increases the chance that the criterion will be met.

Think about it this way. Suppose the Fed had an explicit economic target such as nominal GDP. The Fed’s repetition of its “likely to warrant” language, in the face of an improved outlook, is like an increase in its nominal GDP target. If the Fed had such a target, and if it increased the target, what would you expect the effect to be on interest rates two-and-a half years hence? Surely a higher target would mean that future interest rates are likely to be higher rather than lower.

If you ask me for my best guess, I still expect that the Fed will most likely end up sticking to the late 2014 timetable. After all, we did have the worst recession in 70 years and have barely started to recover even three years later. And under current law, federal fiscal policy is scheduled to drive directly into a brick wall next year. But the Fed’s repetition of its “likely to warrant” language, because it makes me a little more confident in the economy, makes me a little less confident in my prediction about the federal funds rate.

UPDATE (4/25/2012):  Fed projections (PDF) issued today call my whole argument into question.  Looking at the participants' assessments for the "appropriate timing of policy firming," while the median date is the same as in January, as reflected in the statement, the average has declined, with some of the 2016 "ultra-doves" having moved back to 2014 and 2015.  Meanwhile, the improved outlook for 2012 is largely offset by a weaker outlook for 2013 and 2014.  So it is not clear that there is any change in the Fed's reaction function.



DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Kelly Evans on NGDP Targeting and Sustainable Growth

Kelly Evans of The Wall Street Journal has taken a lot of heat from advocates of nominal GDP targeting over her Monday column on the subject. (To her credit, she has engaged with Scott Sumner on the subject in the comments section of his blog post responding to her column.) While I’m also an advocate of NGDP targeting, and I agree with many of their criticisms, I think there are certain points on which her argument is being too quickly dismissed. In particular, both Scott Sumner and Karl Smith point to the following passage:

One worrying aspect of GDP growth prior to 2007 was that it came even as real household incomes stagnated. Assuming that boom-era growth rates were sustainable, and not fueled by a surge in house prices and a credit boom that simply pulled forward demand from the future, is a huge leap in logic.

I think there is some confusion on both sides regarding this point, and to clear it up we need to make a distinction between the demand side and the supply side. Usually when economists talk about “sustainable” growth, they’re referring to the supply side: some growth rates are not sustainable because they deplete the supply of resources too quickly. (In particular, an output growth rate is not sustainable if it exceeds the sum of population growth and labor productivity growth, because we would eventually run out of willing and qualified workers and end up in a wage-price spiral.) But here Kelly Evans seems to be referring to demand sustainability rather than supply sustainability.

Is demand sustainability, in this aggregate sense, a meaningful concept? Many economists would say no, because aggregate demand – demand for everything except money itself – is really just the inverse of the demand for money (or for financial assets in general), and there is no limit on the sustainability of the supply of money: we can always print more. And indeed we can always print more money, but the problem is, will we? Aggregate demand sustainability isn’t meaningful in an absolute sense, but it is meaningful if we condition on the growth of some nominal quantity such as the money supply, the price level, or nominal GDP. A certain level of aggregate demand may not be sustainable at a given rate of inflation, or at a given rate of NGDP growth, and thus there is no guarantee that the trajectory of nominal aggregate demand prior to 2007 was sustainable.

When Kelly Evans refers to a “boom that simply pulled forward demand from the future,” Karl Smith interprets this to mean that people were living above their means. But this is a supply-side interpretation: their means (supply) were not sufficient to sustain the pattern of consumption. I believe that the relevant interpretation is a demand-side one: people were choosing (demanding) a certain pattern of consumption based on false information. To say that their demand was “pulled forward from the future” is to say that they would, had they known the truth, have preferred to consume in the future rather than in the present (or in some cases, that their lenders, had they known the truth, would have preferred that the borrowers consume in the future instead of borrowing from them and consuming in the present)

The underlying problem over the past decade is excessive patience: everyone (by which I mean, mostly, the Chinese) wants to defer their expenditures into the future at the same time. But everyone can’t do that at the same time. In a perfect world, we would solve this problem by allowing prices to drop temporarily, far enough to convince enough people to take advantage of the low prices by spending today instead of in the future. But in the real world, price adjustment doesn’t happen quickly, and it often causes more problems than it solves.

So how do you get people to shift their expenditures into the present? One way is by fooling them. Make them think they’re richer than they really are. Make them think there are ultra-safe assets available to safeguard their future spending capacity. Find the people who want to spend today but don’t have any money, and make someone else think it’s safe to lend them money. But this solution is…unsustainable.

The sustainable solution, in theory at least, is to generate an expected inflation rate high enough that – at some positive interest rate – enough people will choose to spend money today instead of in the future. But that solution may not be on the table. Inflation rates much higher than 2% are heavily frowned upon by…just about everyone, it seems, except a few economists. Is 2% high enough? Who knows?

NGDP targeting is another solution, but is it sustainable? As I discussed at the end of my last blog post, and as Nick Rowe expands upon, NGDP (level) targeting would eventually succeed in raising demand, because every time it failed, it would then promise a yet more aggressive (and therefore more inflationary) policy. But what happens after it succeeds? Unless people have become less patient, we’re back where we started: everyone tries to shift expenditures into the future at the same time. The economy gets depressed again, and the cycle repeats.




DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Can Knut Wicksell Beat Up Chuck Norris?

Nick Rowe argues that NGDP targeting is a way of dealing with coordination failure. Businesses don’t want to hire if nobody’s buying, and households don’t want to buy if nobody’s hiring. So they’re all hoarding money instead. The way to fix it is that you have Chuck Norris threaten to beat up anyone who hoards money. Then businesses start hiring and households start buying (or else they both buy riskier assets, and the people who sold those assets do the hiring and buying, because they also don’t want to be beat up for hoarding the proceeds).

In the simplest version of the argument, beating people up is a metaphor for inflation. But if you don’t believe the Fed can produce more inflation (as many economists believe that the Bank of Japan has tried and failed to produce a positive inflation rate over the past 20 years), you can take beating people up as a metaphor for reducing asset returns. Even if the Fed can’t produce inflation, it can bid down the returns on a lot of assets until people get fed up and start buying riskier assets that can finance new expenditures. Some people don’t even think the Fed can do that, because maybe people have such a strong need for safety that they will only hoard more cash if other safe asset returns go down. I’m not 100% sure myself, but, for the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that the Fed can, if it is aggressive enough in buying safe assets, convince people to buy enough risky assets to get the economy going again.

Nick’s point, though, is that the Fed can do this without actually reducing the return on safe asests (and presumably without producing a lot of inflation either). Chuck Norris can clear a room without actually beating anyone up. The threat is enough. Similarly, in Nick’s view, the Fed can fix a coordination failure by threatening to reduce the return on safe assets, but it won’t have to carry out that threat if it’s credible. In fact, asset returns will go up, because the improved economy will make businesses more profitable, thus raising the return on risky assets and inducing people to abandon safe assets even if the yields go up. Paradoxically, by credibly threatening to push asset returns down, the Fed succeeds in pushing them up.

OK, fine. I’ll note that Ben Bernanke is no Chuck Norris, but perhaps President Romney will replace him with Chuck Norris, or with the antimatter counterpart of Paul Volcker (who was the Chuck Norris of inflation fighting). I’ll also note that Chairman Norris will enter with a considerable handicap, given that many are uncertain about the Fed’s ability to succeed in convincing people to abandon safe assets. If the threat were credible and everyone knew it to be credible, then everyone would know that stock prices are going up and they really ought to sell their bonds as quickly as they can, and we’d immediately be on the path to the good equilibrium. But even with Chuck Norris as Fed Chairman, a lot of people are going to think, “What if the Fed fails? At least cash is safe.” The threat alone quite possibly won’t be enough: Chuck Norris may well have to beat up a bunch of people – QE, Walker style – before the room clears.

But OK, I’m not opposed to violence, when it’s the only way to get something done. Only here’s my concern: how do we know that coordination failure is the real problem?

Flash back to 2006. There was no coordination failure then. Firms were hiring. Households were buying. Commerce was functioning smoothly. Very smoothly, too, in the sense that the economy was neither overheating (no rising inflation, no labor shortage) nor driving interest rates abnormally high. (The 10-year TIPS yield ranged from 1.95% to 2.68% in 2006, consistently below the perceived long-run real growth rate of the US economy.)

Yet that smoothness was based on being completely out of touch with reality – or at least out of touch with what most people today regard the reality to have been. By most accounts, housing prices were inflated, making people feel wealthier than they really were, and lots of seemingly safe assets were available, which, as it turned out, were not at all safe. Even with interest rates relatively low, this deception was apparently necessary in order to get households to buy and firms to hire in sufficient quantities to achieve full employment. Since the deception is no longer feasible, interest rates will presumably have to be a lot lower – even if we rule out coordination failure – in order to induce enough buying and enough hiring today to achieve full employment.

But how much lower? We can’t say exactly. Today 10-year TIPS are yielding close to zero. Is that low enough, if it weren’t for coordination failure? Maybe. Maybe not. Your guess is as good as mine. I can certainly imagine that could we fix the coordination failure (if there is one) and still end up producing well below our capacity.

That’s where Knut Wicksell comes in. Wicksell was the early 20th century economist who argued that prices would tend to go up or down depending on whether the interest rate was below or above its “natural” level (which varied over time). Modern interpretations allow for sticky prices and wages, so instead of falling prices, you get unemployment when the interest rate is too high. As I suggested in a post last year, and in the paragraph above, the “natural interest rate” could be negative, in which case a higher inflation rate is the only way to achieve full employment.

For practical purposes I advocate the same policy that Nick does – nominal GDP targeting – but I’m a bit less optimistic about how quickly and smoothly we could approach the target. And, given a choice, I’d probably favor a more aggressive target than Nick would. One of the implications of the Wicksellian analysis (which is not so clear if you think coordination failure is the only problem) is that more aggressive targets are easier to hit, because they imply higher inflation rates and therefore a lower floor on the real interest rate.

The important thing is to set a target path and stick to it even if you keep missing the first few targets by larger and larger margins. If the natural interest rate is negative, the early targets may be impossible to hit, but if you continue trying to hit the subsequent targets, those targets will imply higher inflation rates. Suppose your target path rises by 5% per year. A 10% increase in NGDP over two years may not imply enough inflation to get the real interest rate down to its natural level, but if NGDP doesn’t rise at all in those two years, the target path will now imply 20% NGDP growth over the subsequent two year period. That would require a lot of inflation – certainly enough to be consistent with a very negative natural real interest rate. Chuck Norris may take his hits in the first few years, but Knut is eventually going down.




DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Fixing What’s Wrong with the Taylor Rule

I see four problems with the original Taylor rule:

1. It’s not really a rule at all. The Taylor rule depends on an estimate of potential output. In practice, most of the discretion that goes into central banking is in the estimate of potential output. Even “discretionary” central bank policy is effectively constrained by the consensus of what would be considered reasonable policy actions, and any of those actions can be rationalized by changing your assumption about potential output. Usually, a central bank that has committed to following a “strict” Taylor rule has roughly the same set of options available as one that is ostensibly operating entirely on its own discretion.
   
   
2. It doesn’t self-correct for missed inflation rates. Since the inflation rate in the Taylor rule is over the previous four quarters, the rule “forgets” any inflation that happened more than four quarters ago. This is a problem for four reasons:
   
   
   
   • It leaves the price level indeterminate in the long run, thus interfering with long-term nominal contracting and decisions that involve prices in the distant future.
     
     
   • It leaves the central bank without an effective tool to reverse deflation when the expected deflation rate exceeds the natural interest rate.
     
     
   • It reduces the credibility of central bank attempts to bring down high inflation rates, because the bank always promises to forgive itself when it fails.
     
     
   • It aggravates the “convexity” problem described below, because the central bank effectively ignores small deviations from its inflation target, even when they accumulate.
     
   
   
3. It doesn’t allow for convexity in the short-run Philips curve. If the estimate of potential output is too low, for example, and the coefficient on output is sufficiently low, then, if the short-run Philips curve is convex, the central bank will allow output to persist below potential output for a long time before “realizing” that it has made an error. In the extreme case, where the short-run Phillips curve is L-shaped, the central bank may allow actual output to be permanently lower than potential output. More generally, the convexity problem can be aggravated by hysteresis effects, in which lower actual output leads to lower potential output, so that the central bank’s wrong estimate of potential output becomes a (permanently) self-fulfilling prophecy.
   
   
4. It can prescribe a negative interest rate target, which is impossible to implement. This appears to have been the case for at least part of 2009 and 2010, although there is disagreement about the details.
   

So how do we fix these problems? I suggest the following solutions:

1. Adopt a fixed method for estimating potential output. (One might allow future changes to the method, but they should be implemented only with a long lag: otherwise, they’ll interfere with the central bank’s credibility, since they can be used to rationalize discretionary policy changes.) Since I like simplicity, I suggest the following method: take the level of actual output in the 4th quarter of 2007 (when most estimates have the US near its potential) and increase it at an annual rate of 3% (the approximate historical growth rate of output) in perpetuity.
   
   
2. Replace the target inflation term with a target price level term. In other words, express it as a deviation from a target price level that rises over time by the target inflation rate. To be clear what I mean by the “target inflation term,” take Taylor’s original equation
   r = p + .5y + .5(p - 2) + 2 (where p refers to the inflation rate)
   and note that I am referring to the “p – 2” term but not to the initial “p” term, which is not really a target but part of the definition of the instrument (an approximation of the real interest rate). In my new formulation, “p – 2” becomes “P – P*,” where “P is (100 times the log of) the actual price level and P* is (100 times the log of) the target price level (i.e., what the price level would be if the inflation rate had always been on target since the base period).
   
   
3. Increase the coefficient on output. If you wish, in order to avoid a loss in credibility, you can also increase the coefficient on the price term by the same amount. What we have then is a more aggressive Taylor rule. It doesn’t solve the convexity problem completely, but it does assure that, when output is far from target, the central bank will take aggressive action to bring it back (unless the price level is far from target in the other direction). That way at least you don’t end up with a long, unnecessary period of severe economic weakness. (John Taylor claims that, according to David Papell’s research, there is “no reason to use a higher coefficient, and…the lower coefficient works better.” But that research only looks at changing the coefficient on the output term without either changing the coefficient on the inflation term or replacing it with a price term, as I suggest above. Having a too-small coefficient on the output term, as in the original rule, is only a second-best way of achieving the results that those other changes would achieve.)
   
   
4. “Borrow” basis points from the future when there are no more basis points available today. In other words, if the prescribed interest rate is below zero, the central bank promises to undershoot the prescribed interest rate once it rises above zero again, such that the number of basis-point-years of undershoot exactly cancel the number of basis-point-years of (unavoidable) overshoot. This method will only work, of course, if the market knows what rule the central bank is following, hence (among other reasons) the need for a rule that really is a rule. If the rule is well-defined, the overshoot will be well-defined, the market will expect the central bank to “pay back” the “borrowed” basis points, and the central bank will be obliged to do so in order to maintain its subsequent credibility.
   

OK, let’s look at the big picture. What have I proposed? I have proposed nominal GDP targeting (along with a specific method for how to implement it). When the price level term and the output term have the same coefficient and both are specified as a deviation from target, the Taylor rule can be simplified by combining the price level target with the output target. Combining Taylor’s original 2% inflation target (re-expressed as a price level path target as per my suggestion) with my suggested method for estimating potential output, we arrive at a 5% nominal output growth path as the target.

If you wish, you can go further by making the rule forward-looking (using a forecast of nominal GDP instead of a lagged observation) and increasing the coefficient to a very high number. And you can enforce the credibility of the forecast by requiring the central bank to use the forecast implicit in a publicly traded nominal GDP futures contract, so that the market is putting its money where the central bank’s mouth is. You end up with the proposal that Scott Sumner has already made. People seem to think that Scott Sumner’s ideas about monetary policy are far out of the mainstream. But I’m not proposing anything radical here, just trying to fix some problems with the very orthodox Taylor rule.




DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.

Inflation Target Debate at The Economist

I have been featured as a guest expert in an online debate about inflation targeting on The Economist's website. The topic: "This house believes that a 2% inflation target is too low." The debate is between Brad DeLong and Bennett McCallum, with Ryan Avent as the moderator.

Not Inflation

I’m sick of hearing people complain about inflation. Unless your income comes from long-duration fixed-income investments, inflation has nothing to do with how much groceries and gasoline you can afford. Inflation is a pattern of increase in the general price level. What matters for affording stuff is a relative price, not the general price level. Specifically in this case it is the price of groceries and gasoline relative to the price of labor. And whether or not you like to eat iPads, the broader problem (for people with jobs) is not that the nominal price of groceries and gasoline is going up but that the real price of labor is going down.

In fact, when measured in terms of how much that labor can produce, even the nominal price of labor is going down, as illustrated by the last part of this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:


Look at the last two years compared to the rest of the chart. As someone who thinks people are more important than gasoline, I’d say this looks a heck of a lot more like deflation than inflation.

And people are more important than gasoline – not just in the ethical sense implied by my snide suggestion, but in a cold, economic sense: labor is more important than energy as an input to the goods and services that get produced. Therefore if the price of labor is falling while the price of energy is rising, the pressure on the prices of goods and services is likely to be downward rather than upward.

Not that I’m expecting the prices of goods and services to start moving dramatically downward in the immediate future. After all, the price of energy has been rising faster than the price of labor has been falling. And the value of the dollar has been falling, while many of the goods Americans consume are produced abroad. And the price of labor is not necessarily going to continue falling. I will say, though, that I think the price of labor provides a strong anchor for the general price level: just as the gold standard provided assurances against runaway inflation, so the “labor standard” provides such assurances. In fact, the labor standard provides better assurances, because labor is the most important input into the production of many useful things, whereas gold is – well, just gold.

(You might object that we really aren’t on a labor standard, because unit labor costs could start rising at any time, and there is no guarantee that policymakers would resist such increases. All I can say is, if you think the gold standard provides a guarantee against changes in the whims of policymakers, you need to read about what happened in 1933 and 1971.)

I’m going to go further and say that I think the falling real price of labor is a good thing, at least in the short run. I’ll even say that rising food and energy prices, while not good in themselves, are symptomatic of something good that is happening and that I would like to see accelerate rather than decelerate.

The flip side of falling real wages is rising profit margins. In a simplified closed economy this would be trivially true: the profit margin for businesses in aggregate would be the difference between the prices they charge and the wages they pay, i.e., the inverse of the real wage. It’s also true to a lesser extent in the real world, although the situation is more complicated because there are imports and exports, and labor and capital are not the only inputs.

What we experienced in 2008 and 2009 can be seen as a dramatic decline in the willingness of aggregate business to produce more for any given level of the aggregate profit margin. (Obviously, the phrase “aggregate business” hides a lot of critical details: part of the problem was with banks’ willingness to lend; part was with hoarding of cash by large corporations; part was with investors’ preferences over public vs. private sector assets; and so on.) What we need to do to fix this problem (and what we are doing, to some extent) is to make profit margins so high that businesses are willing to expand despite their newfound conservatism.

And it should be noted that there is a continuum of price flexibility. At one end, wages are perhaps the least flexible; at the other end, commodity prices are the most flexible. But there is a whole range in-between. When demand picks up, commodity prices rise first, product prices rise more sluggishly (with varying degrees of sluggishness), and wages rise most sluggishly. If the objective is to raise profit margins, then product prices have to rise more quickly than wages, and an inevitable side effect is that commodity prices will rise even faster than product prices. To the (limited) extent that rising commodity prices represent domestic US demand, they are a sign of a process that needs to be encouraged, not discouraged.

In the intermediate run, the evidence is clear that real wages are procyclial. When a recovery really gets going, real wages eventually rise, presumably because the economy as a whole becomes more efficient and “a rising tide lifts all boats.” In the short run, though, we need to get the recovery going before this can happen, and the way to get the recovery going is to let real wages fall – or at least rise more slowly than productivity. Say what you like, I’m cheering for rising prices.


DISCLOSURE: Through my investment and management role in a Treasury directional pooled investment vehicle and through my role as Chief Economist at Atlantic Asset Management, which generally manages fixed income portfolios for its clients, I have direct or indirect interests in various fixed income instruments, which may be impacted by the issues discussed herein. The views expressed herein are entirely my own opinions and may not represent the views of Atlantic Asset Management. This article should not be construed as investment advice, and is not an offer to participate in any investment strategy or product.