JUNE 17 2011

Robert J. Shiller, NYT: The Sickness Beneath the Slump. A half-century ago, there was a lively discussion among economists about the dynamics of price expectations. For example, Alain C. Enthoven, then of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kenneth J. Arrow of Stanford wrote in 1956 that expectations that extrapolate past price increases can produce economic instability. But that thinking was largely cast aside in the 1960s, when my profession embraced the theory that efficient markets formed by people holding rational expectations could explain virtually all economic activity. As a result, economists in recent decades have not developed expectations theory much further. That needs to be corrected in coming years. In the meantime, this failing helps explain why the current crisis was generally unpredicted, and why its future course is so poorly understood.

Bharat Trehan, San Francisco Fed: Household Inflation Expectations and the Price of Oil: It's Déjà Vu All Over Again. The University of Michigan survey of consumers shows that expected inflation has moved up noticeably over the past few months, raising concerns that we may be in for a period of rising inflation. However, the increase in expected inflation likely reflects the excess sensitivity of consumers to food and energy prices. Consistent with this hypothesis, household surveys have not forecast inflation well in recent years, a period of volatile food and energy prices.

Stéphane Dées, Pedro Soares Brinca, ECB: Consumer Confidence as a Predictor of Consumption Spending: Evidence for the United States and the Euro Area. For most academics and policy makers, the depth of the 2007-09 financial crisis, its longevity and its impacts on the real economy resulted from an erosion of confidence. This paper proposes to assess empirically the link between consumer sentiment and consumption expenditures for the United States and the euro area. It shows under which circumstances confidence indicators can be a good predictor of household consumption even after controlling for information in economic fundamentals. Overall, the results show that the consumer confidence index can be in certain circumstances a good predictor of consumption. In particular, out-of-sample evidence shows that the contribution of confidence in explaining consumption expenditures increases when household survey indicators feature large changes, so that confidence indicators can have some increasing predictive power during such episodes. Moreover, there is some evidence of a “confidence channel” in the international transmission of shocks, as U.S. confidence indices lead consumer sentiment in the euro area.

Carlos Carvalho, Stefano Eusepi, and Christian Grisse, NY Fed: Did Unconventional Policy Responses to the Crisis Work? Evidence from a Cross-Country Analysis. The 2008-09 global recession produced a significant loss of output and a deflationary scare in many countries. The depth, scale, and duration of the crisis triggered monetary and fiscal policy actions that were “unconventional” in terms of their size and scope, leading to an ongoing debate over the role that these policy responses played in the stabilization process. How and to what extent were these policies effective? In this post, we examine cross-country experiences and find evidence consistent with the idea that the policies contributed to the stabilization process through their effect on expectations of output and inflation.

James Surowiecki, New Yorker: A Billion Prices Now. A new venture called the Billion Prices Project may help change. The B.P.P., which was designed by the M.I.T. economists Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon, gathers price data not via survey but, rather, by continuously scouring the Web for prices of online goods around the world. (In the U.S., it collects more than half a million prices daily—five times the number that the government looks at.) Using this information, Cavallo and Rigobon have succeeded in building what amounts to the first real-time inflation index. The B.P.P. tells us what’s happening now, not what was happening a month ago. For instance, after Lehman Brothers went under, in September, 2008, the project’s data showed that businesses started cutting prices almost immediately, which suggested that demand had collapsed. The government’s numbers, by contrast, didn’t show this deflationary pressure until that November.

David H. Autor, Alan Manning, Christopher L. Smith: The Contribution of the Minimum Wage to U.S. Wage. Inequality over Three Decades: A Reassessment. We find that the minimum wage reduces inequality in the lower tail of the wage distribution (the 50/10 wage ratio), but the impacts are typically less than half as large as those reported in the literature and are almost negligible for males. Nevertheless, the estimated effects extend to wage percentiles where the minimum is nominally non-binding, implying spillovers. We structurally estimate these spillovers and show that their relative importance grows as the nominal minimum wage becomes less binding. Subsequent analysis underscores, however, that spillovers and measurement error (absent spillovers) have similar implications for the effect of the minimum on the shape of the lower tail of the measured wage distribution. With available precision, we cannot reject the hypothesis that estimated spillovers to non-binding percentiles are due to reporting artifacts. Accepting this null, the implied effect of the minimum wage on the actual wage distribution is smaller than the effect of the minimum wage on the measured wage distribution.

Jean-Pierre Chauffour, World Bank: Freedom, Entitlement, and the Path to Development. Reviewing the economic performance of more than 100 countries over the past 30 years, new empirical evidence tends to support the idea that economic freedom and civil and political liberties are the root causes of why certain countries achieve and sustain better economic outcomes. In contrast, entitlement rights do not seem to have any significant effects on long-term per capita income except for a possible negative effect. These results tend to support earlier findings that, beyond core functions of government responsibility (including the protection of liberty itself), the expansion of the state to provide for various entitlements (including so-called economic, social, and cultural rights) may not make people richer in the long run; it may even make them poorer.

Robert Johnson, Guillermo Noguera, VoxEU: The value-added content of trade. Roughly two-thirds of international trade is in intermediate goods. As a result, measures of trade flows that tally the gross value of goods at each border crossing lead to a distorted view of world trade. Using a value-added measure, this column finds that the controversial US-China imbalance is in fact around 40% smaller than many people think.

Jörn-Steffen Pischke, IZA: Money and Happiness: Evidence from the Industry Wage Structure. There is a well-established positive correlation between life-satisfaction measures and income in individual level cross-sectional data. This paper attempts to provide some evidence on whether this correlation reflects causality running from money to happiness. I use industry wage differentials as instruments for income. This is based on the idea that at least part of these differentials are due to rents, and part of the pattern of industry affiliations of individuals is random. To probe the validity of these assumptions, I compare estimates for life satisfaction with those for job satisfaction, present fixed effects estimates, and present estimates for married women using their husbands' industry as the instrument. All these specifications paint a fairly uniform picture across three different data sets. IV estimates are similar to the OLS estimates suggesting that most of the association of income and well-being is causal.

Sumit Agarwal et al,  Boston College: What is the age of reason? Most U.S. households have accumulated significant assets by retirement, but these assets are often accompanied by significant liabilities. This brief raises the question of whether older households have the ability to manage their increasingly large and complex balance sheets. The first section of this brief documents the decline in cognitive function that occurs as individuals age. The second section describes new evidence from different financial transactions indicating that middle-age adults make fewer financial mistakes than younger or older adults. The third section explores possible policy responses to help older individuals more effectively manage their finances. The final section concludes that the best way forward is not yet clear, stressing that further research is needed on several key questions.

Ralf R Meisenzahl, Joel Mokyr, VoxEU: Is education policy innovation policy? The industrial revolution is, for many, the start of modern economic growth. But what started the industrial revolution? The consensus view is that scarce labour stimulated labour-saving inventions and induced innovation. This column begs to differ. It argues that it was the technical competence of the British mechanical elite that allowed great ideas to turn into economic realities.

Tim Harford, Independence:  In praise of pragmatism. What's to dislike about pragmatism? Nothing. But here's the problem: we pay lip service to the concept, but in practice we dislike pragmatism. We don't vote for genuinely pragmatic politicians. We don't invest in pragmatic businesses. The truth is that making pragmatism work requires effort, embarrassment, and compromise. We don't seem to be willing to pay what it costs. Because the pragmatist tries to take each situation on its own merits and figure out a sensible way forward, pragmatism tends to look hesitant, messy, and prone to error. The ideologue, whether a left winger or a right winger, a corporate visionary or a pub philosopher, looks decisive in comparison. Ideology always offers a neat answer, whether through reference to Karl Marx, Milton Friedman or the latest corporate mission statement.