MAY 7 2010

Gara Afonso, Anna Kovner, Antoinette Schoar. VoxEU: What happened to US interbank lending in the financial crisis? Many commentators have argued that interbank lending froze following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. This column presents evidence from the fed funds market that, while rates spiked and loan terms became more sensitive to borrower risk, mean borrowing amounts remained stable on aggregate. It seems likely that the market did not expand to meet additional demand for funds.

Stephen LeRoy, San Fransisco Fed: Is the “Invisible Hand” Still Relevant?

The single most important proposition in economic theory, first stated by Adam Smith, is that competitive markets do a good job allocating resources. Vilfredo Pareto’s later formulation was more precise than Smith’s, and also highlighted the dependence of Smith’s proposition on assumptions that may not be satisfied in the real world. The financial crisis has spurred a debate about the proper balance between markets and government and prompted some scholars to question whether the conditions assumed by Smith and Pareto are accurate for modern economies.

Susann Rohwedder, Robert Willis, RAND: Mental retirement. Some studies suggest that people can maintain their cognitive abilities through “mental exercise.” This has not been unequivocally proven. Retirement is associated with a large change in a person’s daily routine and environment. In this paper, we propose two mechanisms how retirement may lead to cognitive decline. For many people retirement leads to a less stimulating daily environment. In addition, the prospect of retirement reduces the incentive to engage in mentally stimulating activities on the job. We investigate the effect of retirement on cognition empirically using cross-nationally comparable surveys of older persons in the United States, England, and 11 European countries in 2004. We find that early retirement has a significant negative impact on the cognitive ability of people in their early 60s that is both quantitatively important and causal. Identification is achieved using national pension policies as instruments for endogenous retirement.

John Robertson, Atlanta Fed: The young and the restless. The contribution of opening small firms to net job growth is very large (averaging about 1 million jobs a quarter). In fact, when opening firms are netted out of the data, existing firms on average destroy more jobs than they create. Job creation at new firms has been relatively stable over time. During the recessionary period from the end of 2007 through the second quarter of 2009, the decline in jobs created at opening firms was surprisingly small. Job losses at closing firms did not surge in the most recent recession. In fact, job destruction caused by closing firms is relatively stable over time (research suggests that, in addition to the fact that many firms get smaller before they finally close, there is a significant "up or out" phenomenon in that many firms that closed were recently opened firms that failed). Most of the cyclical action is at surviving firms, and larger surviving firms tend to account for most of the variation in net employment change. During the recessionary period from the end of 2007 through the second quarter of 2009, surviving firms with at least 50 employees lost about twice as many jobs as firms with fewer than 50 employees (see for example, the study by Moscarrini and Postel-Vinay on the relative cyclical sensitivity of large and small firms).

Daniel Aaronson, Bhashkar Mazumder, Shani Schechter, Chicago Fed: What is behind the rise in long-term unemployment? In particular, we attribute the sharp increase in unemployment duration in 2009 to especially weak labor demand, as reflected in a low rate of transition out of unemployment into employment, and a smaller portion of this increase (perhaps 10 percent to 25 percent) to extensions in unemployment insurance benefits. We show that, in any given month, individuals with longer unemployment spells are less likely to be employed the following month. This suggests that the average ongoing spell of unemployment is likely to remain longer than usual well into the economic recovery and expansion, plausibly keeping the unemployment rate above levels observed in past recoveries.

Mirko Abbritti, Sebastian Weber, ECB: Labor market institutions and the business cycle Unemployment rigidities vs. real wage rigidities. This paper investigates the importance of labor market institutions for inflation and unemployment dynamics. Using the New Keynesian framework we argue that labor market institutions should be divided into those institutions that cause Unemployment Rigidities (UR) and those that cause Real Wage Rigidities (RWR). The two types of institutions have opposite effects and their interaction is crucial for the dynamics of inflation and unemployment. We estimate a panel VAR with deterministically varying coefficients and find that there is a profound difference in the responses of unemployment and inflation to shocks under different constellations of the labor market.

Bernt Bratsberg, Elisabeth Fevang, Knut Roed, IZA: Disability in the Welfare State: An Unemployment Problem in Disguise? Economies with low unemployment often have high disability rates. In Norway, the permanent disability insurance rolls outnumber registered unemployment by four to one. Based on administrative register data matched with firms' financial statements and closure data collected from bankruptcy proceedings, we show that a large fraction of Norwegian disability insurance claims can be directly attributed to job displacement and other adverse shocks to employment opportunities. For men, we estimate that job loss more than doubles the risk of entry to permanent disability and that displacements account for fully 28 percent of all new disability insurance claims. We conclude that unemployment and disability insurance are close substitutes.

Gabriel Felbermayr, Mario Larch, Wolfgang Lechthaler, VoxEU: The beneficial international spillovers of labour market reforms. How do labour market reforms in one country affect its trading partners? Politicians often appear to assume detrimental spillover effects from labour market reforms abroad. This column argues that recent models of trade and unemployment highlight beneficial linkages, and this is confirmed by empirical work.

Kym Anderson, John Cockburn, Will Martin, VoxEU: Would freeing up world farm trade reduce or increase poverty? Many economists argue that removing trade barriers such as the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy will be globally welfare-improving. This column presents findings from simulations that estimate the welfare effects depending on the extent of trade reform and possible policy responses. It suggests that removing the world’s price and trade distortions would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3%.

Erik Snowberg, Justin Wolfers, IZA: Explaining the Favorite-Longshot Bias: Is it Risk-Love or Misperceptions? The favorite-longshot bias describes the longstanding empirical regularity that betting odds provide biased estimates of the probability of a horse winning – longshots are overbet, while favorites are underbet. Neoclassical explanations of this phenomenon focus on rational gamblers who overbet longshots due to risk-love. The competing behavioral explanations emphasize the role of misperceptions of probabilities. We provide novel empirical tests that can discriminate between these competing theories by assessing whether the models that explain gamblers' choices in one part of their choice set (betting to win) can also rationalize decisions over a wider choice set, including compound bets in the exacta, quinella or trifecta pools. Using a new, large-scale dataset ideally suited to implement these tests we find evidence in favor of the view that misperceptions of probability drive the favorite-longshot bias, as suggested by Prospect Theory.

Philip Bethge, Spiegel: The Best Translation Program Yet. Google Delivers Foreign Tongues at the Press of a Button. A German scientist Franz Och has developed one of the first translation programs suitable for everyday use. Sheer computing power gives the Google software surprisingly good results -- perhaps the best yet seen created by a machine.