Rortybomb

Michael Kinsley Gets It Wrong On "Austerians"

May 23, 2013Mike Konczal

While I was on vacation, the Internet exploded over a column by Michael Kinsley beefing with Paul Krugman and his follow-up response. The biggest problem with his attempt to reclaim the word “austerians” from its detractors is that he doesn’t provide a working definition, an argument, or even specific people or proposals for what he has in mind. He apparently takes “austerian” to mean “anti-Krugman,” and since Kinsley and others feels that they don’t line up with Krugman, they must all be austerians.

This leads into the second biggest problem with Kinsley’s posts: he concludes that everyone is basically on the same page. It’s just a matter of how you weigh your priorities and concerns. Kinsley writes that “Krugman now says that what he is against is ‘premature’ fiscal austerity. So is everybody. They just disagree on what is ‘premature.’” Also that “[y]ou can be a right-wing Austerian, a left-wing Austerian, a right-wing Keynesian, or a left-wing Keynesian. And (as I also noted last week) the differences are not so great.” (My underlines.)

This is wrong. I’ll quickly summarize three different approaches to the deficit, trying hard to not make straw men of them. There’s (1) Team Keynesian, which thinks that the government should increase the short-term deficit, full-stop. Extend the payroll tax cut for two years. Invest in an infrastructure bank. Mail people checks. Get to the point where the Federal Reserve has traction again on the economy before worrying about the debt.

People in this category are all for ways to deal with the long-term deficit. But they realize that: (a) Medicare is the major driver of those costs, Obamacare needs a chance to deal with this, and it may even be working already; (b) reducing the long-term deficit should require a combination of taxes and spending, and the GOP will refuse any and all tax increases, making a deal impossible; and (c) the GOP wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare rather than bring them into a healthy long-term financial situation, so not everyone is even on the same page.

However, people in (2) Team Barbell think that stimulus must be paired with long-term deficit reduction at the same time. For an example, there’s the original Domenici-Rivlin Restoring America's Future plan: "First, we must recover from the deep recession that has thrown millions out of work... Second, we must take immediate steps to reduce the unsustainable debt... These two challenges must be addressed at the same time, not sequentially."

I assume when Kinsley references needing to eat spinach along with dessert as macroeconomic policy he’s referring to a need for both stimulus and deficit reduction to complement each other. Sadly for him, there’s never been a clear economic case for why these should be addressed together, and plenty of evidence that addressing the second will do little for the first.

(Noah Smith started a conversation recently about whether elites want a slower recovery in order to do structural reform. The original Domenici-Rivlin reform quoted above basically said, “We know unemployment is devastating, and we know more upfront stimulus will help. However, we are going to need you to turn Medicare into a giant Groupon system in order to get it.”)

These two approaches are very different than the arguments for (3) Team Austerity. The argument here is that, if done right, austerity will have a negligible effect on the economy and could even increase prosperity by restoring confidence to private capital. This is not a strawman; it’s the economic plan the GOP put forward when they took the House in 2011, which they got from AEI, which they got from Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna of Harvard.

The 2011 GOP plan also noted, “Analyzing 20 developed countries between 1946 and 2009, Reinhart and Rogoff found a distinct threshold for gross government debt equal to 90 percent of GDP.” They believed action was needed to avoid crossing this threshold, even if it might be painful. (Thankfully, it wouldn’t be according this argument.)

No Pain, No Gain?

Kinsley’s misdiagnosis that the policy disagreements are all a matter of relative priorities then leads him to believe that more weight on short-term pain will lead to better long-term conclusions: “I don’t think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be...The problem is the great, deluded middle class—subsidized by government and coddled by politicians.”

This set the Internet on fire. I’m genuinely not sure what he’s referencing here when he mentions the middle-class. Is Kinsley at the point where he doesn’t get editors? I’m going to rewrite this for him: “During the 2000s, the middle class borrowed way too much, speculating on housing and using fake home equity to go on a spending spree. Now that this bubble has burst, the middle class needs to spend less and save more. There will be, yes, suffering, but they should have been saving more all along. Americans didn’t save enough, and now they have to save more and work off all the bad debts.”

And here’s how I would have responded to that better argument: “Yes, but two things. The first is that everyone can’t all save at the same time. If everyone is saving, nobody is spending, and we start to hit some major problems. Second, the bad debts to be worked off aren’t set in stone. If unemployment is higher, or wage growth slower, or inflation is under-target, that means the pile of bad debts is even greater. Since they are greater, people save more, and then there are even more problems. So even if you have a strongly moralistic tone about what needs to be done, or read this as a pox on our middle class, stimulus in the short term is crucial.”

Because austerity won’t even do the job Kinsley is proposing it will do. In 1933, John Maynard Keynes said, “You will never balance the Budget through measures which reduce the national income.” He argued this because he was a childless gay hedonist saw that austerity won’t even function to reduce the debt load, because a weaker GDP will eliminate any debt savings. This is precisely what is happening in Europe, and it could happen here if we suffocate the recovery too early.

 

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  

 

While I was on vacation, the Internet exploded over a column by Michael Kinsley beefing with Paul Krugman and his follow-up response. The biggest problem with his attempt to reclaim the word “austerians” from its detractors is that he doesn’t provide a working definition, an argument, or even specific people or proposals for what he has in mind. He apparently takes “austerian” to mean “anti-Krugman,” and since Kinsley and others feels that they don’t line up with Krugman, they must all be austerians.

This leads into the second biggest problem with Kinsley’s posts: he concludes that everyone is basically on the same page. It’s just a matter of how you weigh your priorities and concerns. Kinsley writes that “Krugman now says that what he is against is ‘premature’ fiscal austerity. So is everybody. They just disagree on what is ‘premature.’” Also that “[y]ou can be a right-wing Austerian, a left-wing Austerian, a right-wing Keynesian, or a left-wing Keynesian. And (as I also noted last week) the differences are not so great.” (My underlines.)

This is wrong. I’ll quickly summarize three different approaches to the deficit, trying hard to not make straw men of them. There’s (1) Team Keynesian, which thinks that the government should increase the short-term deficit, full-stop. Extend the payroll tax cut for two years. Invest in an infrastructure bank. Mail people checks. Get to the point where the Federal Reserve has traction again on the economy before worrying about the debt.

People in this category are all for ways to deal with the long-term deficit. But they realize that: (a) Medicare is the major driver of those costs, Obamacare needs a chance to deal with this, and it may even be working already; (b) reducing the long-term deficit should require a combination of taxes and spending, and the GOP will refuse any and all tax increases, making a deal impossible; and (c) the GOP wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare rather than bring them into a healthy long-term financial situation, so not everyone is even on the same page.

However, people in (2) Team Barbell think that stimulus must be paired with long-term deficit reduction at the same time. For an example, there’s the original Domenici-Rivlin Restoring America's Future plan: "First, we must recover from the deep recession that has thrown millions out of work... Second, we must take immediate steps to reduce the unsustainable debt... These two challenges must be addressed at the same time, not sequentially."

I assume when Kinsley references needing to eat spinach along with dessert as macroeconomic policy he’s referring to a need for both stimulus and deficit reduction to complement each other. Sadly for him, there’s never been a clear economic case for why these should be addressed together, and plenty of evidence that addressing the second will do little for the first.

(Noah Smith started a conversation recently about whether elites want a slower recovery in order to do structural reform. The original Domenici-Rivlin reform quoted above basically said, “We know unemployment is devastating, and we know more upfront stimulus will help. However, we are going to need you to turn Medicare into a giant Groupon system in order to get it.”)

These two approaches are very different than the arguments for (3) Team Austerity. The argument here is that, if done right, austerity will have a negligible effect on the economy and could even increase prosperity by restoring confidence to private capital. This is not a strawman; it’s the economic plan the GOP put forward when they took the House in 2011, which they got from AEI, which they got from Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna of Harvard.

The 2011 GOP plan also noted, “Analyzing 20 developed countries between 1946 and 2009, Reinhart and Rogoff found a distinct threshold for gross government debt equal to 90 percent of GDP.” They believed action was needed to avoid crossing this threshold, even if it might be painful. (Thankfully, it wouldn’t be according this argument.)

No Pain, No Gain?

Kinsley’s misdiagnosis that the policy disagreements are all a matter of relative priorities then leads him to believe that more weight on short-term pain will lead to better long-term conclusions: “I don’t think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be...The problem is the great, deluded middle class—subsidized by government and coddled by politicians.”

This set the Internet on fire. I’m genuinely not sure what he’s referencing here when he mentions the middle-class. Is Kinsley at the point where he doesn’t get editors? I’m going to rewrite this for him: “During the 2000s, the middle class borrowed way too much, speculating on housing and using fake home equity to go on a spending spree. Now that this bubble has burst, the middle class needs to spend less and save more. There will be, yes, suffering, but they should have been saving more all along. Americans didn’t save enough, and now they have to save more and work off all the bad debts.”

And here’s how I would have responded to that better argument: “Yes, but two things. The first is that everyone can’t all save at the same time. If everyone is saving, nobody is spending, and we start to hit some major problems. Second, the bad debts to be worked off aren’t set in stone. If unemployment is higher, or wage growth slower, or inflation is under-target, that means the pile of bad debts is even greater. Since they are greater, people save more, and then there are even more problems. So even if you have a strongly moralistic tone about what needs to be done, or read this as a pox on our middle class, stimulus in the short term is crucial.”

Because austerity won’t even do the job Kinsley is proposing it will do. In 1933, John Maynard Keynes said, “You will never balance the Budget through measures which reduce the national income.” He argued this because he was a childless gay hedonist saw that austerity won’t even function to reduce the debt load, because a weaker GDP will eliminate any debt savings. This is precisely what is happening in Europe, and it could happen here if we suffocate the recovery too early.

 

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Daily Digest

Daily Digest - May 23: Fearing the Future

May 23, 2013Rachel Goldfarb

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via email.

What’s in millennials’ wallets? Fewer credit cards (LA Times)

Emily Alpert talks to Pipeline Fellow Nona Willis Aronowitz about why young households are carrying less and less credit card debt. According to Aronowitz, it’s all about fear of an uncertain future.

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via email.

What’s in millennials’ wallets? Fewer credit cards (LA Times)

Emily Alpert talks to Pipeline Fellow Nona Willis Aronowitz about why young households are carrying less and less credit card debt. According to Aronowitz, it’s all about fear of an uncertain future.

Why Suburban Poverty Is Less Visible and More Insidious (The Atlantic)

According to Emily Badger, suburban poverty is an incredibly isolating phenomenon. In areas where children play in back yards, not public playgrounds, and commuters drive instead of taking the subway, communal support for the poor all but disappears.

Elizabeth Warren Grills Treasury Secretary on Too Big to Fail (MoJo)

Erika Eichelberger characterizes Jack Lew’s response to Senator Warren’s questioning on breaking up the biggest banks as nothing but avoidance. In the linked video, Lew sticks to name, rank, and serial number while Warren pushes for a direct answer on capping bank size.

How Budget Cuts Could Lead To Higher Costs From Tornadoes (Think Progress)

Bryce Covert reminds us that sequestration is still happening and is causing furloughs at the National Weather Service. The NWS warned residents of Moore, OK about the tornado 16 minutes before it touched down, and we can’t afford to cut it much closer.

Fed Endorses Stimulus, but the Message Is Garbled (NYT)

Nelson D. Schwartz explains that it doesn’t look like the Fed will be cutting back its bond-buying program just yet. Bernanke’s testimony yesterday showed a sense of caution, despite the apparent signs of improvement in the job market.

Robert Kaiser on Dodd-Frank: ‘This example of Congress working also illuminated why it works so rarely.’ (WaPo)

Neil Irwin and Robert Kaiser discuss why no one would want to emulate the process required to pass Dodd-Frank, with months of negotiations for bipartisan support collapsing and the bill barely scraping by. Instead, we get no negotiation and no legislation, saving everyone time.

Why Obama’s Scandals Won’t Lead to Reform (Bloomberg View)

Ezra Klein points out the disconnect between who is upset about the policy problems raised by the IRS and AP scandals, and who wants to make a fuss about them. With those categories split, he doesn’t think we will see any changes in anonymous political spending through 501(c)(4)s or legislation to protect journalists and their sources.

U.S. Retailers See Big Risk in Safety Plan for Factories in Bangladesh (NYT)

Steven Greenhouse says major U.S. retailers are worried the accord that many European retailers have embraced will open them up to legal liability. Apparently the real risk isn’t sending workers into a death trap; it’s all the paperwork and billable hours that could result.

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Daily Digest

Daily Digest - May 21: Fixing the Economy First, but not Yet

May 21, 2013Rachel Goldfarb

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via e-mail.

What's the best way to pass a climate bill? Fix the economy first. (WaPo)

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via e-mail.

What's the best way to pass a climate bill? Fix the economy first. (WaPo)

According to Brad Plumer, if we’re serious about climate change, we need to solve the jobs crisis first: there’s a connection between a Senator’s “green score” from the League of Conservation Voters and the unemployment rate in his or her state.

As rich gain optimism, lawmakers lose economic urgency (WaPo)

Jim Tankersley reminds us that while the economy and jobs remain a top priority for most Americans, the House has only approved three bills that could be considered economic policy this year- and one of those was the 37th attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

Camping Out for Five Days, in Hopes of a Union Job (NYT)

Most jobs created since the recession are low-wage, but Jessica Glazer’s story about more than 800 people camping out to apply for the training program at Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers shows how far people will go to escape that rut.

Sequestration Nation: Budget Cuts Endanger Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Victims (CAP)

Kwame Boadi lays out the effect of sequestration on one of our most vulnerable populations: domestic violence and sexual assault victims, who are losing services, beds in shelters, and more. These cuts could kill, but Congress has prioritized keeping flights on schedule.

Poverty Flees to the Suburbs (MoJo)

Josh Harkinson breaks down yesterday’s report from the Brookings Institution, showing that the suburban poor now outnumber the urban and rural poor. With most federal anti-poverty spending targeting urban communities, there’s a serious mismatch.

Senator Introduces Bill To Allow Holders Of Student Debt To Refinance (Think Progress)

Bryce Covert reports on Senator Gillibrand’s proposal to force the Department of Education to automatically refinance federal student loans with interest rates above 4 percent to fixed 4 percent loans, which would save nearly 37 million borrowers billions in interest payments.

Ready to Testify on Financial Stability, Lew Is Likely To Be Grilled on IRS Scandal (National Journal)

Catherine Hollander notes that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is scheduled to deliver the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s annual report this week, but Congress is less interested in the global financial system than it is in what’s going on at the local IRS office in Cincinnati.

The Unemployed Need Bold, Creative Moves from the Fed (The Fiscal Times)

Mark Thoma remembers when the Fed took risks and pushed the rules to their limits in orchestrating the bailout for big financial institutions. Why, he asks, aren’t they maintaining such boldness for the sake of the unemployed?

 

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Rortybomb

What Would the "Financial Instability" Argument Look Like For Any Other Industry?

May 7, 2013Mike Konczal

It’s becoming a surprisingly influential argument given that it hasn’t been well presented or argued, much less vetted and challenged. What is it? The argument that we should raise interest rates or otherwise contract monetary policy in order to preserve “financial stability.”

Brad Delong says critiquing this idea is “PRIORITY #1 RED FLAG OMEGA,” while Nick Rowe argues that this idea “may be influential. And that idea is horribly wrong.”

Here’s one version of the argument, from a recent speech by Narayana Kocherlakota:

“On the one hand, raising the real interest rate will definitely lead to lower employment and prices. On the other hand, raising the real interest rate may reduce the risk of a financial crisis—a crisis which could give rise to a much larger fall in employment and prices. Thus, the Committee has to weigh the certainty of a costly deviation from its dual mandate objectives against the benefit of reducing the probability of an even larger deviation from those objectives.”

Tim Duy and Ryan Avent commented on this speech, which essentially argued that that raising rates would certainly cause a problem, but rates at their current value could cause even bigger problems.

Let’s be clear on the terms: should we risk another immediate recession (“lower employment and prices”) to preserve a thing called “financial stability?” Five immediate problems jump out from this argument. Nick Rowe emphasized tackling this on an abstract level; I’m going to focus on practical stuff.

1. This whole story seems predicated on the idea that expansionary monetary policy was behind the housing bubble and collapse. I think there’s very little hard evidence for that. Also, the basic stories surrounding interest rates, as JW Mason mentioned in a guest post here, being too low for too long have some serious contradictions. (For instance, if the problem is a “global savings glut,” expansionary monetary policy should push against that by reducing capital inflows.) So if the idea is to risk another recession in order to not repeat the 2000s, we should work with a clearer story about what went wrong in the housing bubble.

2. The term “reaching for yield” is often deployed in these arguments. Low rates means that traders have to take on bigger risks in order to earn a rate of return that is acceptable. (Is there a minimum level of profit that finance must make on lending? And should we throw people out of work to make sure they make it? I hadn’t heard of that, but sounds like a nice gig.)

But either way, it isn’t clear that low rates drive reaching for yield. Yields are the difference between lending and funding rates. And as JW Mason again writes in an important post, banks’ funding costs are also affected by the policy rate. “Looking at the most recent cycle, the decline in the Fed Funds rate from around 5 percent in 2006-2007 to the zero of today has been associated with a 2.5 point fall in bank funding costs but only a 1.5 point fall in bank lending rates -- in other words, a one point increase in spreads.” If anything, the story is the opposite of what people are arguing.

3. The best empirical evidence at understanding the “reach for yield” phenomenon I’ve seen comes from Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina from Harvard University, “Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market.” Here’s a Voxeu summary, and here’s the research pdf. They look at holdings of insurance companies, and find that, “conditional on credit ratings, insurance portfolios are systematically biased toward higher yield, higher CDS bonds...It is also more pronounced for firms with poor corporate governance and for which regulatory capital requirement is more binding.”

This comes across as portfolio managers juking and manipulating capital requirements and the ratings agencies. The authors note that this is a major agency problem for insurance agencies. It was the strongest at the peak of the cycle, but went away during the recession.

Now if I told you we should keep the economy in a permanent recession because senior managers at insurance companies aren’t good at their basic job of monitoring mid-level portfolio managers you’d probably think I was crazy. And I would be. Especially since it seems that “reach for yield” is tied less to monetary policy and more to gaming ratings-based capital requirements.

4. If this is a serious problem, people should be talking about more serious forms of financial regulation. As a starter platform, we can raise capital requirements. Much of this “reach for yield” looks to be a regulatory arbitrage on ratings-based capital requirements, so, say, tripling the leverage requirement should net out the importance of the ratings agencies in capital requirements.

This is why a more coherent story about what we are concerned about when we think about “financial stability” would help. If we need to make the financial system less complex and prone to abusive practices, requiring parties of a derivatives contract to hold a stake in the underlying asset would do a lot. Are we worried about contagion? In that case, force banks to hold more capital as well as convertible instruments. About bad debts holding back the economy? Then reform the bankruptcy code, dropping the 2005 “reforms.” Some people are demanding more jail sentences, not only for the benefit of the public but for boards and shareholders who can’t keep their workers in line.

5. Because imagine this argument in the context of any other industry. Right now the interest rate is above where it needs to be to guarantee full employment. People are arguing that we should raise rates because banks might make loans, even though that is what the financial sector is supposed to do. (As Daniel Davies notes, “If the Federal Reserve sets out on a policy of lowering interest rates in order to encourage banks to make loans to the real economy, it is a bit weird for someone's main critique of the policy to be that it is encouraging banks to make loans.”)

Now imagine the government was going to take some land it owns containing oil and sell it to an oil company. Could you imagine someone saying, “We shouldn’t do this, because we can’t assume that oil companies are capable of drilling, refining and selling that oil” as a valid concern? Not concerns about random spills or global warming? But instead expressing concerns about whether the industry is capable of executing its most basic function.

Or take immigration. Imagine if a common response to letting a large number of high-skilled immigrants into the country would be “but we can’t assume that the labor market is capable of matching people with skills who want to work with employers who are willing to pay to complete jobs.” It’s tantamount to saying, “we shouldn’t assume that the labor market can do its basic function.”

It’s hard not to read the financial stability arguments as saying “look, we can’t trust the financial sector to accomplish its most basic goals.” If true, that’s a very significant problem that should cause everyone a lot of concern. It should make us ask why we even have a financial system if we can’t expect it to function, or function only by putting the entire economy at risk.

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  

 

It’s becoming a surprisingly influential argument given that it hasn’t been well presented or argued, much less vetted and challenged. What is it? The argument that we should raise interest rates or otherwise contract monetary policy in order to preserve “financial stability.”

Brad Delong says critiquing this idea is “PRIORITY #1 RED FLAG OMEGA,” while Nick Rowe argues that this idea “may be influential. And that idea is horribly wrong.”

Here’s one version of the argument, from a recent speech by Narayana Kocherlakota:

“On the one hand, raising the real interest rate will definitely lead to lower employment and prices. On the other hand, raising the real interest rate may reduce the risk of a financial crisis—a crisis which could give rise to a much larger fall in employment and prices. Thus, the Committee has to weigh the certainty of a costly deviation from its dual mandate objectives against the benefit of reducing the probability of an even larger deviation from those objectives.”

Tim Duy and Ryan Avent commented on this speech, which essentially argued that that raising rates would certainly cause a problem, but rates at their current value could cause even bigger problems.

Let’s be clear on the terms: should we risk another immediate recession (“lower employment and prices”) to preserve a thing called “financial stability?” Five immediate problems jump out from this argument. Nick Rowe emphasized tackling this on an abstract level; I’m going to focus on practical stuff.

1. This whole story seems predicated on the idea that expansionary monetary policy was behind the housing bubble and collapse. I think there’s very little hard evidence for that. Also, the basic stories surrounding interest rates, as JW Mason mentioned in a guest post here, being too low for too long have some serious contradictions. (For instance, if the problem is a “global savings glut,” expansionary monetary policy should push against that by reducing capital inflows.) So if the idea is to risk another recession in order to not repeat the 2000s, we should work with a clearer story about what went wrong in the housing bubble.

2. The term “reaching for yield” is often deployed in these arguments. Low rates means that traders have to take on bigger risks in order to earn a rate of return that is acceptable. (Is there a minimum level of profit that finance must make on lending? And should we throw people out of work to make sure they make it? I hadn’t heard of that, but sounds like a nice gig.)

But either way, it isn’t clear that low rates drive reaching for yield. Yields are the difference between lending and funding rates. And as JW Mason again writes in an important post, banks’ funding costs are also affected by the policy rate. “Looking at the most recent cycle, the decline in the Fed Funds rate from around 5 percent in 2006-2007 to the zero of today has been associated with a 2.5 point fall in bank funding costs but only a 1.5 point fall in bank lending rates -- in other words, a one point increase in spreads.” If anything, the story is the opposite of what people are arguing.

3. The best empirical evidence at understanding the “reach for yield” phenomenon I’ve seen comes from Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina from Harvard University, “Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market.” Here’s a Voxeu summary, and here’s the research pdf. They look at holdings of insurance companies, and find that, “conditional on credit ratings, insurance portfolios are systematically biased toward higher yield, higher CDS bonds...It is also more pronounced for firms with poor corporate governance and for which regulatory capital requirement is more binding.”

This comes across as portfolio managers juking and manipulating capital requirements and the ratings agencies. The authors note that this is a major agency problem for insurance agencies. It was the strongest at the peak of the cycle, but went away during the recession.

Now if I told you we should keep the economy in a permanent recession because senior managers at insurance companies aren’t good at their basic job of monitoring mid-level portfolio managers you’d probably think I was crazy. And I would be. Especially since it seems that “reach for yield” is tied less to monetary policy and more to gaming ratings-based capital requirements.

4. If this is a serious problem, people should be talking about more serious forms of financial regulation. As a starter platform, we can raise capital requirements. Much of this “reach for yield” looks to be a regulatory arbitrage on ratings-based capital requirements, so, say, tripling the leverage requirement should net out the importance of the ratings agencies in capital requirements.

This is why a more coherent story about what we are concerned about when we think about “financial stability” would help. If we need to make the financial system less complex and prone to abusive practices, requiring parties of a derivatives contract to hold a stake in the underlying asset would do a lot. Are we worried about contagion? In that case, force banks to hold more capital as well as convertible instruments. About bad debts holding back the economy? Then reform the bankruptcy code, dropping the 2005 “reforms.” Some people are demanding more jail sentences, not only for the benefit of the public but for boards and shareholders who can’t keep their workers in line.

5. Because imagine this argument in the context of any other industry. Right now the interest rate is above where it needs to be to guarantee full employment. People are arguing that we should raise rates because banks might make loans, even though that is what the financial sector is supposed to do. (As Daniel Davies notes, “If the Federal Reserve sets out on a policy of lowering interest rates in order to encourage banks to make loans to the real economy, it is a bit weird for someone's main critique of the policy to be that it is encouraging banks to make loans.”)

Now imagine the government was going to take some land it owns containing oil and sell it to an oil company. Could you imagine someone saying, “We shouldn’t do this, because we can’t assume that oil companies are capable of drilling, refining and selling that oil” as a valid concern? Not concerns about random spills or global warming? But instead expressing concerns about whether the industry is capable of executing its most basic function.

Or take immigration. Imagine if a common response to letting a large number of high-skilled immigrants into the country would be “but we can’t assume that the labor market is capable of matching people with skills who want to work with employers who are willing to pay to complete jobs.” It’s tantamount to saying, “we shouldn’t assume that the labor market can do its basic function.”

It’s hard not to read the financial stability arguments as saying “look, we can’t trust the financial sector to accomplish its most basic goals.” If true, that’s a very significant problem that should cause everyone a lot of concern. It should make us ask why we even have a financial system if we can’t expect it to function, or function only by putting the entire economy at risk.

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The New Guard

What is the Crash Generation?

Apr 29, 2013Nona Willis Aronowitz

Down but not out, Millennials who came of age during the Great Recession could reshape the American economy and society.

The economy is personal. It colors our decisions about everything: when to have kids, what city to move to, who to vote for, who to sleep with. And nobody knows this better than the biggest generation in history: the Millennials. These 80 million Americans have come of age during the worst economic recession since the Depression, an experience that will have profound repercussions on our lives—and our political consciousness.

Down but not out, Millennials who came of age during the Great Recession could reshape the American economy and society.

The economy is personal. It colors our decisions about everything: when to have kids, what city to move to, who to vote for, who to sleep with. And nobody knows this better than the biggest generation in history: the Millennials. These 80 million Americans have come of age during the worst economic recession since the Depression, an experience that will have profound repercussions on our lives—and our political consciousness.

I call us the Crash Generation. For many of us in our twenties, 2008 was a period awash in exhilarating highs and terrifying lows. The words “depression,” “economic crisis,” “mass layoffs,” and “foreclosures,” along with “hope,” “change,” and “Obama,” all clogged the headlines and made their way into whiskey-fueled party conversations. Washington and the media had never been so frank about the cataclysmic proportions of a financial crash. And a candidate had never kicked young voters into such high gear like Barack Obama, who seemed to reflect the seismic demographic shift our generation was heralding. The mythic American dream-bubbles were bursting for young people at the exact moment we had begun to wield our political influence. That second half of 2008 was our JFK assassination. Our Vietnam. Our Great Depression. 

Study after study finds that Millennials are “materialistic” or obsessed with money. But really we're obsessed with the money we don’t have; put in political terms, we’re class-conscious. Thanks to Occupy Wall Street and Mitt Romney’s slipups, the concept of income inequality is finally part of the public conversation. The economic patterns of the past few decades, with the financial crisis as their crescendo, have yielded an atmosphere ripe for a youth-led social movement that hinges on our bottom lines. Because of our sheer numbers, we have enormous potential to transform waves into tsunamis, and we have already flexed our political muscle in two elections. Those of us who came of age when the bubble burst, particularly the downwardly mobile “privileged poor,” have a tangible common experience, a renewed indignation.

But too often, this indignation often has nowhere to go, and is enveloped in our frenetic lives of multiple jobs, demoralizing underemployment, or joblessness—the constant physical and emotional stress of keeping our heads above water. Years later, the status quo has not budged. We haven’t done much to shrink the income gap or encourage upward mobility. We haven’t gotten our leaders to address anemic state budgets, deregulation, unions’ decline, freelancers’ precarity, shrinking wages, student debt, or the insane cost of living in major cities. All those economic pressures have primed this era for an economic shift. Yet those same pressures limit our freedom to protest or push for policy changes. In other words, we’re pissed—but we’re paralyzed by the very forces we’re pissed about.

Right now, most of the permanent underclass feels politically frozen: When one missed paycheck means descending into poverty without a safety net, unions and political activism seem like a low priority. Educated young people are frozen, too—caught in the privileged-poor paradox. Our meager (or nonexistent) paychecks incite righteous anger—especially when we think of our middle class parents’ luck at their age—but they also choke our very ability to organize, create, and take risks. As our wages fall, our degrees lose value, prices of food and rent rise, and workdays expand, we have less and less time to read a book, to join a rally in the next town over, to hop a bus to Washington, to even have a hours-long discussion about politics with our friends. Most Millennials aren’t starving, Great Depression-style, but they are starved for a low cost of living and a baseline of economic freedom.

Here's the good news: For every 10 twentysomethings seized with frustration, there’s one pushing the conversation forward and coming up with compelling solutions, however flawed or nascent. This seething discontent signals the start of a major shift. The fizzling of Occupy Wall Street, for instance, shouldn’t depress us; Roosevelt Institute fellow Dorian Warren recently reminded me that if this is our civil rights movement, we’re only in 1957—a year after the Montgomery bus boycott. So far, our empty wallets and our denial have hindered our ability to meaningfully influence policy, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen soon.

Some people think that entrepreneurship, not government policy, will save Millennials. The truth is, not everyone has the support and connections to launch their own business or score a job at a scrappy start-up. Besides, start-up culture and economic reform aren’t mutually exclusive. In a post-recession era, both social change and entrepreneurism stem from being able to live securely and cheaply. A 2008 study from the RAND Corporation found evidence of "entrepreneurship lock," where workers resist leaving firms offering health care due to the high premiums of the individual health insurance market. Compare this reticence to places like Norway: When journalist Max Chafkin visited the country in 2010, he reported on a spate of Norwegian entrepreneurs who not only were happy to pay high taxes, but attributed their penchant for risk-taking to a strong social safety net. (There are also more entrepreneurs per capita in Norway than in the United States. Same with Canada, Denmark, and Switzerland.)

Millennials are starting to realize that if their lives are going to improve, there needs to be policy that addresses unemployment, student debt, and income inequality. Young people like the ones striking outside McDonald’s in New York, or the students who won a minimum wage hike in San Jose, or the ones in Roosevelt’s Pipeline and Campus Network across the country—they’re all updating historic social movements (and the policies they’ve pushed) that have improved the lives of middle and working class Americans. 

The future movers and shakers of the Crash Generation have a modern sensibility. We’re Internet natives. We’re optimists. We believe in community and the “sharing economy.” We’ve all but settled the culture wars. But we also have faith in the idea of government, if not its current reality, and we’re not afraid to engage with successful historical models.

Nona Willis Aronowitz is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow. Join her tomorrow night at the Roosevelt Institute for a Crash Generation salon on "Why Millennials Should Care About Family Policy," with guest speaker Sharon Lerner of Demos. She will also be moderating a panel on paving the path to good jobs at A Bold Approach to the Jobs Emergency on June 4th.

 

Woman looking for work image via Shutterstock.com

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Reinhart-Rogoff a Week Later: Why Does This Matter?

Apr 24, 2013Mike Konczal

Retreat!

Well this is progress. We are seeing distancing by conservative writers on the Reinhart/Rogoff thesis. In Feburary, Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote, “The debt hurts the economy already. The canonical work of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and its successors carry a clear message: countries that have gross government debt in excess of 90% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are in the debt danger zone. Entering the zone means slower economic growth. Granted, the research is not yet robust enough to say exactly when and how a crisis will engulf the US, but there is no reason to believe that America is somehow immune." (h/t QZ.)

Today, Holtz-Eakin writes about Reinhart and Rogoff in National Review, but drops the "canonical" status. Now they are just two random people with some common sense the left is beating up. "In order to distract from the dismal state of analytic and actual economic affairs, the latest tactic is to blame...two researchers, Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff, who made the reasonable observation that ever-larger amounts of debt must eventually be associated with bad economic news."

That's not actually what they said, and if you read Holtz-Eakin in February Reinhart-Rogoff is sufficient evidence to enact the specific plans he wants. Now there's no defense of the "danger zone" argument; just the idea that the stimulus failed. Retreat!

This is getting a bigger audience. (If you haven't seen The Colbert Report on the Reinhart/Rogoff issue, it's fantastic.) But going foward, plan beats no plan. And a critique isn't a plan. So what should we conclude about Reinhart-Rogoff a week later, now that the critique seems to have won? How should the government approach the debt?

Cliffs and Tradeoffs

One thing about the "cliff" metaphor is that there's no tradeoff that would make it acceptable. If you are driving, there are all kinds of tradeoffs you make with your route, but you'd never agree to a tradeoff that has you driving off a cliff. There were numerous other ways of describing this scenario, either the technical "nonlinearities" or the "danger zone" of Eakin just a few months ago.

With the danger zone metaphor now out of play, perhaps economists can see the relevant tradeoffs more clearly. Reinhart-Rogoff stand with a small negative relationship between debt and growth, one that is likely driven by low growth rather than high debt. And despite what you've heard, there's no literature that shows the casuation in the other direction.

But let's say they found it. Well, what's the relevant tradeoff? If there's even a basic fiscal multipler at work, the upside more than compensates for the downside. As Brad DeLong notes, if you consider a multipler of 1.5 and a marginal tax share of 1/3, the small correlation people are finding - Delong uses 0.006 percent from an in-house estimate - are more than canceled. Spending 2 percent more causes a bump of 3 percent of GDP, while debt goes up 1 percent of GDP. As Delong notes, "3% higher GDP this year and slower growth that leads to GDP lower by 0.06% in a decade. And this is supposed to be an argument against expansionary fiscal policy right now?"

And as the IMF noted recently, "Studies suggest that fiscal multipliers are currently high in many advanced economies. One important implication is that fiscal tightening could raise the debt ratio in the short term, as fiscal gains are partly wiped out by the decline in output." Now is the time to move away from austerity and towards more expansion. There are costs (though debt servicing is at a historic low), but the benefits outweight them.
 
Right now people are debating what level of debt-to-GDP we should level out at and how quickly that debt should begin to come down. There's also the debt ceiling battle coming at the end of the summer. This new information will influence all these conversations.
 
Was it Important?
 
Meanwhile, Ryan Avent at The Economist's Free Exchange writes about Reinhart-Rogoff here. To address one of his points, Avent also thinks that the Reinhart-Rogoff cliff results are overplayed as something that actually impacted policy. This is always a tricky question to answer, but Reinhart-Rogoff certainly dominated the sensible, mainstream conversation over the deficit and was a favorite go-to for conservatives in particular. I also think it was popular among journalists, because it was a straight-line number that was supposed to not require complicated modelng. Media Matters put together this video of people discussing the Reinhart-Rogoff cutoff:

(Bonus fun: in the video, at the 1m20s, Niall Ferguson refers to the 90 percent result as "the law of finance.")

I think the ideas matter. (Why else would we do this?) I think it's important to understand this revelation in light of other players moving against austerity, including both the IMF and the financial industry. As people reposition themselves, understanding that one of the core old ideas is now out of play allows a different reconfiguration of power. Also, it's worth repeating, it's becoming harder to pretend that austerity hasn't failed. It didn't even do the actual goal, which was reduce the debt-to-GDP ratios of the countries that were being targeted.

Citizens across the world who were normally indifferent are realizing that they were sold a bad bag of goods when it came to austerity and belt-tightening. They are now trying to figure out what happened, and how things could be done differently. As these are such critical issues, this examination is important. It's great we are having it.

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  

 

Retreat!

Well this is progress. We are seeing distancing by conservative writers on the Reinhart/Rogoff thesis. In Feburary, Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote, “The debt hurts the economy already. The canonical work of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and its successors carry a clear message: countries that have gross government debt in excess of 90% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are in the debt danger zone. Entering the zone means slower economic growth. Granted, the research is not yet robust enough to say exactly when and how a crisis will engulf the US, but there is no reason to believe that America is somehow immune." (h/t QZ.)

Today, Holtz-Eakin writes about Reinhart and Rogoff in National Review, but drops the "canonical" status. Now they are just two random people with some common sense the left is beating up. "In order to distract from the dismal state of analytic and actual economic affairs, the latest tactic is to blame...two researchers, Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff, who made the reasonable observation that ever-larger amounts of debt must eventually be associated with bad economic news."

That's not actually what they said, and if you read Holtz-Eakin in February Reinhart-Rogoff is sufficient evidence to enact the specific plans he wants. Now there's no defense of the "danger zone" argument; just the idea that the stimulus failed. Retreat!

This is getting a bigger audience. (If you haven't seen The Colbert Report on the Reinhart/Rogoff issue, it's fantastic.) But going foward, plan beats no plan. And a critique isn't a plan. So what should we conclude about Reinhart-Rogoff a week later, now that the critique seems to have won? How should the government approach the debt?

Cliffs and Tradeoffs

One thing about the "cliff" metaphor is that there's no tradeoff that would make it acceptable. If you are driving, there are all kinds of tradeoffs you make with your route, but you'd never agree to a tradeoff that has you driving off a cliff. There were numerous other ways of describing this scenario, either the technical "nonlinearities" or the "danger zone" of Eakin just a few months ago.

With the danger zone metaphor now out of play, perhaps economists can see the relevant tradeoffs more clearly. Reinhart-Rogoff stand with a small negative relationship between debt and growth, one that is likely driven by low growth rather than high debt. And despite what you've heard, there's no literature that shows the casuation in the other direction.

But let's say they found it. Well, what's the relevant tradeoff? If there's even a basic fiscal multipler at work, the upside more than compensates for the downside. As Brad DeLong notes, if you consider a multipler of 1.5 and a marginal tax share of 1/3, the small correlation people are finding - Delong uses 0.006 percent from an in-house estimate - are more than canceled. Spending 2 percent more causes a bump of 3 percent of GDP, while debt goes up 1 percent of GDP. As Delong notes, "3% higher GDP this year and slower growth that leads to GDP lower by 0.06% in a decade. And this is supposed to be an argument against expansionary fiscal policy right now?"

And as the IMF noted recently, "Studies suggest that fiscal multipliers are currently high in many advanced economies. One important implication is that fiscal tightening could raise the debt ratio in the short term, as fiscal gains are partly wiped out by the decline in output." Now is the time to move away from austerity and towards more expansion. There are costs (though debt servicing is at a historic low), but the benefits outweight them.
 
Right now people are debating what level of debt-to-GDP we should level out at and how quickly that debt should begin to come down. There's also the debt ceiling battle coming at the end of the summer. This new information will influence all these conversations.
 
Was it Important?
 
Meanwhile, Ryan Avent at The Economist's Free Exchange writes about Reinhart-Rogoff here. To address one of his points, Avent also thinks that the Reinhart-Rogoff cliff results are overplayed as something that actually impacted policy. This is always a tricky question to answer, but Reinhart-Rogoff certainly dominated the sensible, mainstream conversation over the deficit and was a favorite go-to for conservatives in particular. I also think it was popular among journalists, because it was a straight-line number that was supposed to not require complicated modelng. Media Matters put together this video of people discussing the Reinhart-Rogoff cutoff:

(Bonus fun: in the video, at the 1m20s, Niall Ferguson refers to the 90 percent result as "the law of finance.")

I think the ideas matter. (Why else would we do this?) I think it's important to understand this revelation in light of other players moving against austerity, including both the IMF and the financial industry. As people reposition themselves, understanding that one of the core old ideas is now out of play allows a different reconfiguration of power. Also, it's worth repeating, it's becoming harder to pretend that austerity hasn't failed. It didn't even do the actual goal, which was reduce the debt-to-GDP ratios of the countries that were being targeted.

Citizens across the world who were normally indifferent are realizing that they were sold a bad bag of goods when it came to austerity and belt-tightening. They are now trying to figure out what happened, and how things could be done differently. As these are such critical issues, this examination is important. It's great we are having it.

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  

 

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What's the Best Way to Help the Long-Term Unemployed? Full Employment.

Apr 24, 2013Mike Konczal

What's the best way to help the long-term unemployed? There's new concern about how difficult it is for the long-term unemployed to find jobs in light of an interesting study by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed and PhD candidate. Ghayad sent out resumes that were identical except for how long the candidate was unemployed, and the longer they were unemployed, the less likely it was they would get called back. Matthew O'Brien has a great writeup of the study here, and there's additional thoughts from Megan McArdle, Paul Krugman, Felix Salmon, and Matt Yglesias.

The impact of long-term unemployment on human lives is very real, and I think the government should be combating it using every tool it has. However, I want to push back on a few of the economic ideas that tend to hover in the background of these discussions; specifically, the idea that we should consider the long-term unemployed uniquely in trouble in this economy. Because, based on my interpretation of the evidence, the best approach to handling this problem is to aim for full employment.

It's well known that it is harder for those who have been out of the labor force the longest to find jobs. It would be weird if Ghayad hadn't found that result. There is a large debate in the literature about whether this is driven by employers or job candidates, and Ghayad provides a very useful study finding that employers are a key part here.

But let's look at the likelihood of finding a job in three different economic scenarios (2000, 2007, and 2012) by duration of unemployment:

But notice that when the economy is much stronger, as it was in 2000 when unemployment averaged 4 percent, the rate at which the long-term unemployed find jobs jumps up. Let's zoom in on the last category, the job-finding rate of those who have been searching for a job for 53 weeks or longer, and chart it back to 1995. (Since the data, provided by the BLS, is not seasonally adjusted, the number here is a 12-month rolling average.)

As you can see, it's much easier for the long-term unemployed to find jobs when there's a tight labor market, like there was in the late 1990s. This rate collapses in a recession, and with years of 7+ percent unemployment, it has stayed depressed.

A lot of people are drawing conclusions that something has broken in long-term unemployment based on a previous paper by Rand Ghayad, where he disaggregates the Beveridge Curve by unemployment duration. I've been critical of that paper. I think, strictly speaking, that the disaggregation just tells us that the long-term unemployed have become a larger percentage of the unemployed, which we knew. Meanwhile, the labor market is depressed for everyone, even short-term unemployed (also see SF Fed for more evidence of this). As the long-term unemployed are less likely to drop out of the labor market than in normal times right now, the dramatic increase in the long-term unemployed hasn't turned into a large drop in labor force participation like many worry about.

We should do things that are smart policies that target the long-term unemployed. Amy Taub of Demos has done convincing work on why ending credit checks as part of the job interview process would be a good idea. Extending unemployment insurance is also important. But the idea that we should change course away from boosting the general economy strikes me as a bad idea. The long-term unemployed experience the worst impact of a generally weak economy. But its that weak economy that is doing the damage. If unemployment was actually brought down, which we could do with more expansonary policy, then employers couldn't afford to be so choosy.

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  

 

What's the best way to help the long-term unemployed? There's new concern about how difficult it is for the long-term unemployed to find jobs in light of an interesting study by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed and PhD candidate. Ghayad sent out resumes that were identical except for how long the candidate was unemployed, and the longer they were unemployed, the less likely it was they would get called back. Matthew O'Brien has a great writeup of the study here, and there's additional thoughts from Megan McArdle, Paul Krugman, Felix Salmon, and Matt Yglesias.

The impact of long-term unemployment on human lives is very real, and I think the government should be combating it using every tool it has. However, I want to push back on a few of the economic ideas that tend to hover in the background of these discussions; specifically, the idea that we should consider the long-term unemployed uniquely in trouble in this economy. Because, based on my interpretation of the evidence, the best approach to handling this problem is to aim for full employment.

It's well known that it is harder for those who have been out of the labor force the longest to find jobs. It would be weird if Ghayad hadn't found that result. There is a large debate in the literature about whether this is driven by employers or job candidates, and Ghayad provides a very useful study finding that employers are a key part here.

But let's look at the likelihood of finding a job in three different economic scenarios (2000, 2007, and 2012) by duration of unemployment:

But notice that when the economy is much stronger, as it was in 2000 when unemployment averaged 4 percent, the rate at which the long-term unemployed find jobs jumps up. Let's zoom in on the last category, the job-finding rate of those who have been searching for a job for 53 weeks or longer, and chart it back to 1995. (Since the data, provided by the BLS, is not seasonally adjusted, the number here is a 12-month rolling average.)

As you can see, it's much easier for the long-term unemployed to find jobs when there's a tight labor market, like there was in the late 1990s. This rate collapses in a recession, and with years of 7+ percent unemployment, it has stayed depressed.

A lot of people are drawing conclusions that something has broken in long-term unemployment based on a previous paper by Rand Ghayad, where he disaggregates the Beveridge Curve by unemployment duration. I've been critical of that paper. I think, strictly speaking, that the disaggregation just tells us that the long-term unemployed have become a larger percentage of the unemployed, which we knew. Meanwhile, the labor market is depressed for everyone, even short-term unemployed (also see SF Fed for more evidence of this). As the long-term unemployed are less likely to drop out of the labor market than in normal times right now, the dramatic increase in the long-term unemployed hasn't turned into a large drop in labor force participation like many worry about.

We should do things that are smart policies that target the long-term unemployed. Amy Taub of Demos has done convincing work on why ending credit checks as part of the job interview process would be a good idea. Extending unemployment insurance is also important. But the idea that we should change course away from boosting the general economy strikes me as a bad idea. The long-term unemployed experience the worst impact of a generally weak economy. But its that weak economy that is doing the damage. If unemployment was actually brought down, which we could do with more expansonary policy, then employers couldn't afford to be so choosy.

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  

 

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Are Student Loans Becoming a Macroeconomic Issue?

Apr 23, 2013Mike Konczal

What's the general economic consensus on the impact of student loans on the household finances of those who hold them? Here's "Student Loans: Do College Students Borrow Too Much—Or Not Enough?" (Christopher Avery and Sarah Turner, 2012), which argues, "[t]here is little evidence to suggest that the average burden of loan repayment relative to income has increased in recent years." Using data from 2004-2009, the authors find that "the mean ratio of monthly payments to income is 10.5 percent" for those in repayment six years after initial enrollment.

They boost that number with a 2006 study by Baum and Schwarz to conclude that two trends cancel each other out: there's rising debt but steady student debt-to-income ratios. How can this happen? It "can be attributed to a combination of rising earnings, declining interest rates, and increased use of extended repayment options." This is how, though average total undergraduate debt jumped 66 percent to a value of $18,900 from 1997 to 2002, "average monthly payments increased by only 13 percent over these five years. The mean ratio of payments to income actually declined from 11 percent to 9 percent because borrower.”

Let's put this a different way. If you asked economists looking at the data if student loans could be having a macroeconomic effect, especially through a financial burden on those that have them, they'd say that the actual percent of monthly income paying student loans hasn't changed all that much since the 1990s. They may be making larger lifetime payments, since they'll carry the debts longer, but that's a choice they are making, which could reflect positive or negative developments. Certaintly there's no short-term strain. So there aren't any economic consequences worth mentioning when it comes to student loans.

I always thought this approach had problems. First, they were only looking at the pre-crisis era, so we couldn't see the impact of student loans once we hit a serious problem. And they were just rough averages of short-term income aggregates, rather than looking at specific individuals with or without student-debt and seeing what kinds of spending, particularly on longer-term durable goods, they do. But since I had no data myself, I never pushed on this very hard. Part of the problem is that student loans have happened relatively quickly, so quantitatively it's hard for data agencies to adjust their techniques to "see" this data easily, and not just lump them in with "other debts."

That is starting to change. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is doing some high-end analysis of student loans, and their economists Meta Brown and Sydnee Caldwell have a great post from last week, "Young Student Loan Borrowers Retreat from Housing and Auto Markets." They find that over the past decade, people with student loans were more likely to have a mortgage at age 30 and a car loan at age 25. In the crisis this edge has collapsed:

There's a similar dynamic for car loans.

The researchers argue that two obvious explanations stands out for this collapse. The first is that the actual future expected earnings have fallen for this group, so they are going to spend less. The second is that credit constraints are especially binding, as those with student loans have a worse credit score than those without.

Derek Thompson at The Altantic Business responds critically, arguing that: (1) cars and mortgages are falling out of favor with young people, so this is likely a secular trend; (2) young people are essentially doing a "debt swap," switching cars and mortgages for education to take advantage of an education premium, and the cars and mortgages will come later; and (3) though this is, at best, a short-term drag on the economy and reflecting short-term problems, it'll super-charge our economy come later.

What should we make of this?

(1) It's possible that there is a secular trend to it, with young people not wanting mortgages or cars. But why wouldn't the spread survive? "People with student loans" is a broad category of people, and it is difficult to assume that it's just people moving to become renters in urban cores driving the entire thing. The collapse of the spread between the two coinciding with the crisis makes it hard to believe it's just a coincidence.

(2) As discussed at the beginning, the overall idea in the student loan data literature is that student loans shouldn't have a negative impact on consumption, especially at the national level. The extra cost of servicing the debt is more than balanced out by the extra income earned, even if the length of the debt needs to adjust to meet that. Indeed, there's often a "best investment ever" or "leaving money on the table" aspect to the discussion of higher education and student loans. So if this data holds, it's a major change from the normal way economists understand this.

And the issue of student debt is where the problem with the "education premium" is going to hit a wall. The college premium is driven just as much by high school wages falling as it is by college-educated wages increasing, which has slowed in the past decade. So if you have to take on large debt to secure a stagnating college-level income, it suddenly isn't clear that it is such a great deal, even if there's a strictly defined "premium" over the alternative.

(3) It isn't clear that the upswing in people, particularly women, taking on additional education is involved with this collapse in borrowing, as the ages of 25 and 30 cut off many people in school. I think it would reflect the collapse in the housing market, but the auto loan market is there as well. It is true that the economy as a whole is deleveraging, but that is largely reflective of housing and foreclosures.

How much this reverts if we get back to full employment and whether there's a "swap" that could lead to a better long-term economy are good questions, but the fact that we even have to put the question these way shows a change in what economists believed about student loans. No matter what, this shows that education isn't enough of an insurance against the business cycle.

And I actually see it the other way - right now Ben Bernanke is working overtime to try and get interest rates to the lowest they've ever been, and he still can't induce borrowing by college-educated young people. Congress also lowered interest rates on new student loans, though too many student loans are out there at high rates given the disinflationary times. If the lower lending isn't the result of institutional issues with credit scores, that means college-educated young people are particularly battered in this economy. And there could be a low-level drag on the economy for the foreseeable future.

If the New York Fed is taking requests, the biggest question I have is how student loans are impacting household formations. Young people are living with their parents for longer at a point where getting an additional million homebuyers would supercharge the economy. Are they living at home because they are unemployed, or because they are un(der)employed and have student loans? If it is the second, then there's definitely a serious lag on the economy.

But the real issue revealed by this study is that this stuff is important. It is showing up in national data; the people arguing that student loans simply disappear under higher earnings now have a macroeconomic issue to deal with.

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What's the general economic consensus on the impact of student loans on the household finances of those who hold them? Here's "Student Loans: Do College Students Borrow Too Much—Or Not Enough?" (Christopher Avery and Sarah Turner, 2012), which argues, "[t]here is little evidence to suggest that the average burden of loan repayment relative to income has increased in recent years." Using data from 2004-2009, the authors find that "the mean ratio of monthly payments to income is 10.5 percent" for those in repayment six years after initial enrollment.

They boost that number with a 2006 study by Baum and Schwarz to conclude that two trends cancel each other out: there's rising debt but steady student debt-to-income ratios. How can this happen? It "can be attributed to a combination of rising earnings, declining interest rates, and increased use of extended repayment options." This is how, though average total undergraduate debt jumped 66 percent to a value of $18,900 from 1997 to 2002, "average monthly payments increased by only 13 percent over these five years. The mean ratio of payments to income actually declined from 11 percent to 9 percent because borrower.”

Let's put this a different way. If you asked economists looking at the data if student loans could be having a macroeconomic effect, especially through a financial burden on those that have them, they'd say that the actual percent of monthly income paying student loans hasn't changed all that much since the 1990s. They may be making larger lifetime payments, since they'll carry the debts longer, but that's a choice they are making, which could reflect positive or negative developments. Certaintly there's no short-term strain. So there aren't any economic consequences worth mentioning when it comes to student loans.

I always thought this approach had problems. First, they were only looking at the pre-crisis era, so we couldn't see the impact of student loans once we hit a serious problem. And they were just rough averages of short-term income aggregates, rather than looking at specific individuals with or without student-debt and seeing what kinds of spending, particularly on longer-term durable goods, they do. But since I had no data myself, I never pushed on this very hard. Part of the problem is that student loans have happened relatively quickly, so quantitatively it's hard for data agencies to adjust their techniques to "see" this data easily, and not just lump them in with "other debts."

That is starting to change. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is doing some high-end analysis of student loans, and their economists Meta Brown and Sydnee Caldwell have a great post from last week, "Young Student Loan Borrowers Retreat from Housing and Auto Markets." They find that over the past decade, people with student loans were more likely to have a mortgage at age 30 and a car loan at age 25. In the crisis this edge has collapsed:

There's a similar dynamic for car loans.

The researchers argue that two obvious explanations stands out for this collapse. The first is that the actual future expected earnings have fallen for this group, so they are going to spend less. The second is that credit constraints are especially binding, as those with student loans have a worse credit score than those without.

Derek Thompson at The Altantic Business responds critically, arguing that: (1) cars and mortgages are falling out of favor with young people, so this is likely a secular trend; (2) young people are essentially doing a "debt swap," switching cars and mortgages for education to take advantage of an education premium, and the cars and mortgages will come later; and (3) though this is, at best, a short-term drag on the economy and reflecting short-term problems, it'll super-charge our economy come later.

What should we make of this?

(1) It's possible that there is a secular trend to it, with young people not wanting mortgages or cars. But why wouldn't the spread survive? "People with student loans" is a broad category of people, and it is difficult to assume that it's just people moving to become renters in urban cores driving the entire thing. The collapse of the spread between the two coinciding with the crisis makes it hard to believe it's just a coincidence.

(2) As discussed at the beginning, the overall idea in the student loan data literature is that student loans shouldn't have a negative impact on consumption, especially at the national level. The extra cost of servicing the debt is more than balanced out by the extra income earned, even if the length of the debt needs to adjust to meet that. Indeed, there's often a "best investment ever" or "leaving money on the table" aspect to the discussion of higher education and student loans. So if this data holds, it's a major change from the normal way economists understand this.

And the issue of student debt is where the problem with the "education premium" is going to hit a wall. The college premium is driven just as much by high school wages falling as it is by college-educated wages increasing, which has slowed in the past decade. So if you have to take on large debt to secure a stagnating college-level income, it suddenly isn't clear that it is such a great deal, even if there's a strictly defined "premium" over the alternative.

(3) It isn't clear that the upswing in people, particularly women, taking on additional education is involved with this collapse in borrowing, as the ages of 25 and 30 cut off many people in school. I think it would reflect the collapse in the housing market, but the auto loan market is there as well. It is true that the economy as a whole is deleveraging, but that is largely reflective of housing and foreclosures.

How much this reverts if we get back to full employment and whether there's a "swap" that could lead to a better long-term economy are good questions, but the fact that we even have to put the question these way shows a change in what economists believed about student loans. No matter what, this shows that education isn't enough of an insurance against the business cycle.

And I actually see it the other way - right now Ben Bernanke is working overtime to try and get interest rates to the lowest they've ever been, and he still can't induce borrowing by college-educated young people. Congress also lowered interest rates on new student loans, though too many student loans are out there at high rates given the disinflationary times. If the lower lending isn't the result of institutional issues with credit scores, that means college-educated young people are particularly battered in this economy. And there could be a low-level drag on the economy for the foreseeable future.

If the New York Fed is taking requests, the biggest question I have is how student loans are impacting household formations. Young people are living with their parents for longer at a point where getting an additional million homebuyers would supercharge the economy. Are they living at home because they are unemployed, or because they are un(der)employed and have student loans? If it is the second, then there's definitely a serious lag on the economy.

But the real issue revealed by this study is that this stuff is important. It is showing up in national data; the people arguing that student loans simply disappear under higher earnings now have a macroeconomic issue to deal with.

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Guest Post: The Time Series of High Debt and Growth in Italy, Japan, and the United States

Apr 22, 2013Deepankar Basu

Mike Konczal here. In light of the collapse of the argument for a "cliff" in debt-to-GDP ratio, the most pressing issue to figure out is what to make of any minor relationship between debt and GDP. Which way does the causation work? Arin Dube wrote about this last week. Today, Deepankar Basu, assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, takes a deep dive into this data using time series methods. Though this will involve some complicated techniques and charts, this work is crucial for understanding the current situation. I hope you check it out!

Public Debt and Economic Growth in the Postwar U.S., Italian and Japanese Economies

Deepankar Basu

A recent paper by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin (HAP) has effectively refuted one of the most frequently cited stats of recent years: countries with public debt above 90 percent of GDP experience sharp drop offs in economic growth. This “90 percent” result was put into circulation in 2010 by a paper written by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (RR) and was heavily circulated by conservative policymakers, commentators, and economists.

I think the most important issue in the subsequent discussion in blogs and newspaper op-eds (for a quick rundown see here) is the question of causality. Does the negative correlation between public debt and economic growth rest on high levels of public debt causing low economic growth, as RR and other “austerians” claim (we borrow this term from Jim Crotty)? Or is the causation the reverse of what the austerians say, meaning low economic growth causes higher public debt? Using the HAP data set for 20 OECD countries, economist Arindrajit Dube of University of Massachusetts-Amherst has shown that (a) the negative relationship between public debt and growth is much stronger at low levels of growth, and (b) the association between past economic growth and current debt levels is much stronger than the association between current levels of debt and future economic growth. This is strong evidence for the second causation argument, where low growth leads to high debt.

While Dube has worked in a single equation framework with a panel data set, in this article, I change gears and ask a time series question instead: what useful information, if any, can one extract about the relationship between public debt and economic growth from historical data for individual countries? In particular, I ask the following question: can data on historical coevolution of public debt and economic growth in the postwar U.S., Italian and Japanese economies tell us anything useful about possible causal relationships among these two variables? To briefly summarize the results, I find that the time series pattern of the dynamic relationship between public debt and economic growth in the postwar U.S., Italian, and Japanese economies is consistent with low growth causing high debt rather than high debt causing low growth.

Why I Chose the U.S., Italy, and Japan

As reported in Table A-1 of the HAP paper, there are only 10 countries in the sample of advanced economies from 1946-2009 that witnessed debt-to-GDP ratios above 90. These countries generally experienced years with debt/GDP above 90 consecutively, so they form easily observable episodes. However, in the postwar period very few of these episodes exhibit notably slow growth. The U.S. from 1946-2009 has already been explained in detail here as being caused by the reduction in government spending due to demobilization from World War II.

Mike Konczal here. In light of the collapse of the argument for a "cliff" in debt-to-GDP ratio, the most pressing issue to figure out is what to make of any minor relationship between debt and GDP. Which way does the causation work? Arin Dube wrote about this last week. Today, Deepankar Basu, assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, takes a deep dive into this data using time series methods. Though this will involve some complicated techniques and charts, this work is crucial for understanding the current situation. I hope you check it out!

Public Debt and Economic Growth in the Postwar U.S., Italian and Japanese Economies

Deepankar Basu

A recent paper by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin (HAP) has effectively refuted one of the most frequently cited stats of recent years: countries with public debt above 90 percent of GDP experience sharp drop offs in economic growth. This “90 percent” result was put into circulation in 2010 by a paper written by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (RR) and was heavily circulated by conservative policymakers, commentators, and economists.

I think the most important issue in the subsequent discussion in blogs and newspaper op-eds (for a quick rundown see here) is the question of causality. Does the negative correlation between public debt and economic growth rest on high levels of public debt causing low economic growth, as RR and other “austerians” claim (we borrow this term from Jim Crotty)? Or is the causation the reverse of what the austerians say, meaning low economic growth causes higher public debt? Using the HAP data set for 20 OECD countries, economist Arindrajit Dube of University of Massachusetts-Amherst has shown that (a) the negative relationship between public debt and growth is much stronger at low levels of growth, and (b) the association between past economic growth and current debt levels is much stronger than the association between current levels of debt and future economic growth. This is strong evidence for the second causation argument, where low growth leads to high debt.

While Dube has worked in a single equation framework with a panel data set, in this article, I change gears and ask a time series question instead: what useful information, if any, can one extract about the relationship between public debt and economic growth from historical data for individual countries? In particular, I ask the following question: can data on historical coevolution of public debt and economic growth in the postwar U.S., Italian and Japanese economies tell us anything useful about possible causal relationships among these two variables? To briefly summarize the results, I find that the time series pattern of the dynamic relationship between public debt and economic growth in the postwar U.S., Italian, and Japanese economies is consistent with low growth causing high debt rather than high debt causing low growth.

Why I Chose the U.S., Italy, and Japan

As reported in Table A-1 of the HAP paper, there are only 10 countries in the sample of advanced economies from 1946-2009 that witnessed debt-to-GDP ratios above 90. These countries generally experienced years with debt/GDP above 90 consecutively, so they form easily observable episodes. However, in the postwar period very few of these episodes exhibit notably slow growth. The U.S. from 1946-2009 has already been explained in detail here as being caused by the reduction in government spending due to demobilization from World War II.

Other than the U.S., the only two countries with debt-to-GDP above 90 percent and average growth below 2 percent are Italy and Japan, with 1 percent and 0.7 percent respectively. With the inclusion of the earlier years from 1946-1949, New Zealand’s average growth increases from RR’s reported -7.6 percent to 2.6 percent. That is why I chose to focus in this article on U.S., Italy and Japan.

For the U.S. economy, federal debt declined from its high value (more than 100 percent of GDP) in the immediate postwar years to its lowest level in the mid-1970s (less than 25 percent of GDP), thereafter increasing till the mid-1990s and falling again over the next decade or so before picking up again with the onset of the global financial and economic crisis in 2007. The growth rate of real GDP has fluctuated a lot in the postwar period, with average values being higher in the two decades after the end of WWII than after the 1980s.

The Italian economy has experienced a different pattern: low levels of public debt till the early 1970s followed by a three-decade-long increase, with contemporary debt levels remaining at historical highs. Japan witnessed a very similar pattern: low levels of public debt till the mid-1970s followed by four decades of steady increase, with contemporary levels of debt hovering at historical highs. In terms of economic growth, both Italy and Japan witnessed a gradual slowdown, even as growth fluctuated at business cycle frequencies, over the entire postwar period. Thus, for all the three countries, there is large variation over time in both the variables (public debt and economic growth), which can be exploited to investigate their dynamic interrelationships. 

To motivate the analysis, in Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, I give time series plots of public debt and economic growth (year-on-year change in real GDP) for the three economies that I have chosen for this analysis: the U.S. economy between 1946 and 2012, the Italian economy between 1951 and 2009, and the Japanese economy between 1956 and 2009.

FIGURE 1.1  (USA): Time Series plots, for the period 1946-2012, of (a) federal debt held by public as a share of GDP (top panel), and (b) year-on-year change in real GDP (bottom panel). Source: data for debt is from Table B-78, Economic Report of the President, 2013; data for growth is from NIPA Table 1.1.1 

FIGURE 1.2  (ITALY): Time Series plots, for the period 1946-2012, of (a) federal debt held by public as a share of GDP (top panel), and (b) year-on-year change in real GDP (bottom panel). Source: Herndorn, Ash and Pollin (2013).

FIGURE 1.3  (JAPAN): Time Series plots, for the period 1946-2012, of (a) federal debt held by public as a share of GDP (top panel), and (b) year-on-year change in real GDP (bottom panel). Source: Herndorn, Ash and Pollin (2013). 

Why Use a Time Series Framework

Why do I adopt a time series framework? Adopting a time series lens allows one to use a vector autoregression (VAR) analysis, a popular time series methodology that is especially suitable for studying rich dynamic interactions among a group of time series variables. The pattern of dynamic interactions (allowing for complex lagged effects) can be nicely summarized through plots of orthogonalized impulse response functions, which trace out the effect of an unexpected change in a variable on the time paths of all the variables in the system (orthogonalizing the error makes sure that the effect of impulses to one error is not contaminated by cross correlation with other errors in the system).  In other words, this allows a researcher to address the following question: how would the variables in the VAR evolve over time when impacted by an unexpected change in one of the variables, holding other things constant? The key phrases here are “unexpected change in one of the variable” and “holding other things constant.” How do we interpret these key phrases?

Recall that in a VAR, every variable is explained by its past values and by past values of the other variables in the system. Each equation also has an unexplained part, the random error term. Thus an impulse imparted to the error (i.e., the unexplained part) in one of the equations in the VAR, can be understood as an “unexpected change,” or change in the variable that is not explained by its own past values and past values of the other variables in the VAR. Orthogonalizing the errors, on the other hand, implies that a change in one error is uncorrelated by changes in other errors in the system. Hence, when the researcher traces out the impact of an impulse to one error, she is confident that it is not picking up effects of changes in the other errors. This is a clear advantage over cross sectional analysis of correlations among variables, where distinguishing the effects of changes in one variable from the other might be difficult.  

In addition, a VAR allows each variable to be endogenous; i.e., it not only allows for lagged but also contemporaneous interaction among the variables. Thus, the researcher is not forced to take an a priori stand on whether a variable is exogenous (or not) as in a single equation estimation framework (where the dependent variable is, by assumption, endogenous, and some of the independent variables are exogenous).

Of course, a VAR will not, by itself, address the issue of causality; one needs to impose additional restrictions to distinguish causality from correlation (i.e., to tackle the so-called identification problem). A common identification strategy is to adopt a “causal ordering” of the variables in the VAR, which is a way to restrict some of the contemporaneous effects among the variables. If a variable is causally prior to another, this means that changes in the second variable cannot have any contemporaneous impacts on the first. In a two-variable vector autoregression (VAR), there are only two possible orderings: the first variable can be assumed to be causally prior to the second, or vice versa.

So, one can use both orderings (instead of taking a stand on which is the correct structural relationship) and see if the shape of the impulse response functions change according to the ordering adopted. If it does not, then the pattern of dynamic interaction captured by impulse response functions can be thought of as a reasonable approximation of underlying structural relationships. The point is this: if the impulse response functions display qualitatively similar shapes in both ordering of variables (and remember there are only two possibilities here), then the dynamic patterns of interaction are independent of the ordering. Either of them can be used to address the question: how does the system react to an unexpected change in one variable? This is a common empirical strategy in the time series literature, and as such we adopt it here. (This strategy becomes difficult to implement and interpret when there are more than two variables in the system, in which case theoretically motivated restrictions are imposed to get identification.)

Two-Variable VAR Analysis for Individual Countries

To investigate the debt-growth relationship, I estimate a two-variable VAR with an optimal number of lags (where public debt as a share of GDP and year-over-year change in real GDP are the two variables) for each of the three countries separately: the U.S. economy for the period 1946-2012, the Italian economy over 1951-2009, and the Japanese economy over the period 1956-2009. (I choose the “optimal” number of lags using the Akaike Information Criterion.) I find three interesting results.

First, the contemporaneous correlation between the errors in the two equations of the VAR is negative for each of the three countries (-0.56 for the U.S., -0.54 for Italy, and -0.30 for Japan). This suggests that unexpected changes in debt and economic growth move in the opposite direction in each of these countries. This finding is in line with existing results, both of Reinhart-Rogoff and their critics.

Second, I conduct Granger non-causality tests to understand lags of which of the two variables in the VAR better helps in predicting the other. Table 1 summarizes Granger non-causality test results for the three countries. The first column in Table 1 tests whether debt does not Granger-cause growth; i.e., the null hypothesis that all lags of debt enter the growth equation with zero coefficients. A high p-value indicates that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected; i.e., lags of debt do not help in predicting growth. The entries in the first column are all relatively large and show that lags of debt do not help in predicting growth with high levels of statistical significance. This is true for all three economies, and especially for Italy (which has a p-value of 0.81).

The second column in Table 1 tests for the opposite direction of predictability: it tests whether growth does not Granger-cause debt; i.e., the null hypothesis that all lags of growth enter the debt equation with zero coefficients. A low p-value indicates that the null hypothesis can be strongly rejected; i.e., lags of growth do help in predicting debt. The entries in column 2 are all relatively small and show that lags of growth help in strongly predicting debt for all three countries (both U.S. and Italy have p-values of 0, and Japan has a p-value of 0.04).

This finding about Granger non-causality is in line with similar results reported in 2010 by Josh Bivens and John Irons for the U.S. economy. The fact that similar results hold for Italy and Japan, which have been witnessing relatively higher levels of public debt in the past few decades, is indeed a strong rebuttal of austerian claims. It demonstrates that low growth leading to (or helping to predict) high debt is more consistent with the time series data than high debt leading to (or helping to predict) low growth. Moreover, this is true not only for the U.S. economy but also for Italy and Japan. 

Third, I analyze plots of impulse response functions (IRF) to decipher possible directions of effects running between debt and growth for all three countries for the two possible “orderings” of the variables. Figure 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 display the orthogonalized IRFs with the first “ordering,” where debt is assumed to be “causally prior” to growth (meaning changes in debt can have a contemporaneous impact on growth but not the other way around). Figure 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3 display the orthogonalized IRFs with the alternative ordering, where growth is assumed to be “causally prior” to debt (meaning changes in growth can have a contemporaneous impact on debt but not the other way around).

 

 

FIGURE 2.1. (USA): Orthogonalized impulse response functions using a Cholesky decomposition for a 2 variable VAR (debt and growth) with optimal number of lags (chosen with AIC). The recursive VAR is estimated with annual data for the U.S. economy for the period 1946- 2012 and 90 percent bootstrapped confidence intervals are included in the IRF plots. Ordering: Debt is causally prior to growth.

FIGURE 2.2. (ITALY): Orthogonalized impulse response functions using a Cholesky decomposition for a 2 variable VAR (debt and growth) with optimal number of lags (chosen with AIC). The recursive VAR is estimated with annual data for the Italian economy for the period 1951- 2009 and 90 percent bootstrapped confidence intervals are included in the IRF plots. Ordering: Debt is causally prior to growth.

FIGURE 2.3. (JAPAN): Orthogonalized impulse response functions using a Cholesky decomposition for a 2 variable VAR (debt and growth) with optimal number of lags (chosen with AIC). The recursive VAR is estimated with annual data for the Japanese economy for the period 1956- 2009 and 90 percent bootstrapped confidence intervals are included in the IRF plots. Ordering: Debt is causally prior to growth.

Impulse Response Function: Impact of Debt on Growth

Let us start with the first ordering. In the top panel (right) of Figure 2.1 (USA), a one standard deviation positive impulse to the debt shock (i.e., the error in the equation that predicts debt) reduces growth contemporaneously, but growth returns back to zero within a year and stays there after that. In the top (right) panel of Figure 2.2 (ITALY), a similar impulse to the debt shock reduces growth contemporaneously, and growth returns back to zero within the next two years and stays there after that (notice that the 90 percent confidence interval includes zero). In the top panel (right) of Figure 2.3 (JAPAN), a one standard deviation impulse to the debt shock reduces growth contemporaneously, but growth returns back to zero within a year and gradually falls over the next several years (though here, too, the 90 percent confidence interval includes zero).

What story do these pictures tell us? If debt has a contemporaneous effect on growth (but not the other way round), then an unexpected increase in the level of debt in any year (due, for instance, to an increase in the deficit of a government that has given a tax break) will reduce economic growth in that year, but the negative impact will be washed out relatively quickly. The system will return back to its original growth path within the next few years. The speed with which the system reverts back to its original state is quickest for the U.S, slower for Japan, and slowest for Italy.  

FIGURE 3.1. (USA): Orthogonalized impulse response functions using a Cholesky decomposition for a 2 variable VAR (debt and growth) with optimal number of lags (chosen with AIC). The recursive VAR is estimated with annual data for the U.S. economy for the period 1946- 2012 and 90 percent bootstrapped confidence intervals are included in the IRF plots. Ordering: Growth is causally prior to debt.

FIGURE 3.2. (ITALY): Orthogonalized impulse response functions using a Cholesky decomposition for a 2 variable VAR (debt and growth) with optimal number of lags (chosen with AIC). The recursive VAR is estimated with annual data for the Italian economy for the period 1951- 2009 and 90 percent bootstrapped confidence intervals are included in the IRF plots. Ordering: Growth is causally prior to debt.

FIGURE 3.3. (JAPAN): Orthogonalized impulse response functions using a Cholesky decomposition for a 2 variable VAR (debt and growth) with optimal number of lags (chosen with AIC). The recursive VAR is estimated with annual data for the Japanese economy for the period 1956- 2009 and 90 percent bootstrapped confidence intervals are included in the IRF plots. Ordering: Growth is causally prior to debt.

Let us now turn to the second ordering. In the top panel (right) of Figure 3.1 (USA), a one standard deviation impulse to the debt shock has no contemporaneous effect on growth, but there is a positive effect on growth for the next two years. In the top panel (right) of Figure 3.2 (ITALY), a one standard deviation impulse to the debt shock has no contemporaneous effect on growth, and a fluctuating (negative and positive) impact on growth which is not very precisely estimated (the 90 percent confidence interval includes zero). In the top panel (right) of Figure 3.3 (JAPAN), a one standard deviation impulse to the debt shock has no contemporaneous effect on growth, but growth experiences a positive impact for the next three years, after which it starts falling – all of which is estimated pretty imprecisely (the 90 percent confidence interval includes zero).

How should we interpret these pictures? In this case, only Italy displays a negative impact of debt on growth; both Japan and the U.S. show mildly positive impacts of unexpected changes in debt levels (though the effects are estimated pretty imprecisely). Thus, if it were the case that the contemporaneous effect between debt and growth runs from the latter to the former (as the second ordering assumes), then increases in levels of public debt might even have a positive impact on economic growth, as witnessed in the U.S. and Japan. Why might this be the case? This might be reflecting the positive multiplier effect on output growth of a boost to aggregate demand coming from an increase in the government’s deficit. Evidence for the U.S. and Japan suggests that this effect might be non-zero, at least in the short run.

Thus, for all three countries and in both orderings, an unexpected increase in debt in any year does not have any statistically significant negative effect on economic growth in future years. When I allow the contemporaneous effect to run from growth to debt, the short- to medium-term impact is positive for the U.S. and Japan, though the effects are not very precisely estimated. This evidence is contrary to RR’s claim that high debt leads to low growth.   

Impulse Response Function: Impact of Growth on Debt

Once again, let us start with the first ordering. In the bottom panel (left) of Figures 2.1 (USA), 2.2 (ITALY), and 2.3 (JAPAN), a one standard deviation impulse to the growth shock reduces debt unambiguously in the short and medium term. While debt starts returning to its initial level in the case of the U.S. economy after about five to six years, it keeps declining in the Italian and Japanese economies. (This seems to suggest that the impact of economic growth on debt levels is longer lasting in Italy and Japan than in the U.S.) The bottom panels (left) of Figures 3.1 (USA), 3.2 (ITALY), and 3.3 (JAPAN) display impulse response plots for a one standard deviation impulse to the growth shock for the second ordering. They paint a qualitatively similar picture to that seen for the first ordering.

So, what do these figures tell us? They show that an unexpected increase in economic growth (for instance, due to an increase in aggregate demand caused by expanding exports) will be associated with a decrease in levels of public debt. Hence, we can turn this picture around and infer the following: when there is an unexpected decrease in economic growth, it will be associated with an increase in the levels of public debt over the next several years. This is true for all the three countries and for both orderings of the variables in the VAR.

Moreover, unlike the effect of debt on growth (which we saw in the top panels of the figures), the effects of unexpected changes in growth on future debt levels are statistically significant (though imprecisely measured) up to about 10 years in the future. This evidence clearly supports the anti-austerian position that low growth leads to higher public debt.

Summary

To summarize, I find that the time series pattern of the dynamic relationship between public debt and economic growth in the postwar U.S., Italian, and Japanese economies is consistent with low growth causing high debt rather than the high debt causing low growth. I draw this conclusion from two types of analyses: Granger non-causality tests and an investigation of impulse response function plots.

Granger non-causality tests allow one to ask the following questions: (a) do debt levels in the past help in better predicting current economic growth, and (b) does economic growth in the past help in improving predictions of current debt levels? The evidence suggests that for the U.S., Italy, and Japan, the answer to the first question is a NO and the answer to the second is a YES.

Impulse response analysis allows one to address the following questions: (a) what is the impact of an unexpected increase in current debt levels on the future time path of economic growth, and (b) how does an unexpected decline in economic growth affect future levels of debt? The data suggests that an unexpected increase in debt levels has only a small effect on future economic growth but an unexpected decline in economic growth is associated with large and long-lasting increases in public debt levels.     

Thus, empirical evidence from time series analysis of the U.S., Italian, and Japanese economies seems to bolster the critique presented by our colleagues Herndon, Ash, and Pollin, as well as Dube and others, of the Reinhart-Rogoff claim that high public debt leads to low economic growth. If anything, the evidence supports causality running in the opposite direction: low growth causes higher public debt.

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Guest Post: Reinhart/Rogoff and Growth in a Time Before Debt

Apr 17, 2013Arindrajit Dube

[Mike Konczal here.  Yesterday I wrote about a paper by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin of University of Massachusetts, Amherst. They replicated the influential Reinhart/Rogoff paper Growth in a Time of Debt. There were many responses on the internet, including Jared Bernstein, Matt Yglesias, Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, and many, many others. Reinhart and Rogoff have since responded with a statement. They believe that the findings do not "affects in any significant way the central message of the paper or that in our subsequent work." What is that message? That higher debt is associated with lower growth.

From the beginning many economists (Krugman, Bivens and Irons) have argued that their paper probably has the causation backwards: slow growth causes higher debt. But now that Herndon, Ash and Pollin have made the data used public, perhaps a talented econometrician could actually answer this? Arindrajit Dube was up for the challenge. Dube is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.]

Growth in a Time Before Debt…

Recent work by my colleagues at UMass Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin (2013)—hereafter HAP—has demonstrated that in contrast to the apparent results in Reinhart and Rogoff (2010), there is no real discontinuity or "tipping point" around 90 percent of debt-to-GDP ratio.

In their response, Reinhart and Rogoff—hereafter RR—admit to the arithmetic mistakes, but argue that the negative correlation between debt-to-GDP ratio and growth in the corrected data still supports their original contention. Taking the Stata dataset that HAP generously made available as part of their replication exercise, I first reproduced the nonparametric graph in HAP (2013) using a lowess regression (slightly different than the specific method they used). The dotted lines are 95 percent bootstrapped confidence bands.

There is a visible negative relationship between growth and debt-to-GDP, but as HAP point out, the strength of the relationship is actually much stronger at low ratios of debt-to-GDP.  This makes us worry about the causal mechanism. After all, while a nonlinearity may be expected at high ratios due to a tipping point, the stronger negative relationship at low ratios is difficult to rationalize using a tipping point dynamic.

In their response, RR state that they were careful to distinguish between association and causality in their original research. Of course, we would only really care about this association if it likely reflects causality flowing from debt to growth (i.e. higher debt leading to lower growth, the lesson many take from RR's paper).

While it is difficult to ascertain causality from plots like this, we can leverage the time pattern of changes to gain some insight. Here is a simple question: does a high debt-to-GDP ratio better predict future growth rates, or past ones?  If the former is true, it would be consistent with the argument that higher debt levels cause growth to fall. On the other hand, if higher debt "predicts" past growth, that is a signature of reverse causality.

Below I have created similar plots by regressing current year's GDP on (1) the next 3 years' average GDP growth, and (2) last three years' average GDP growth. (My .do file is available here so anyone can make these graphs. After all, if I made an error, I'd rather know about it now.)

Figure 2:  Future and Past Growth Rates and Current Debt-to-GDP Ratio

As is evident, current period debt-to-GDP is a pretty poor predictor of future GDP growth at debt-to-GDP ratios of 30 or greater—the range where one might expect to find a tipping point dynamic.  But it does a great job predicting past growth.
 
This pattern is a telltale sign of reverse causality.  Why would this happen? Why would a fall in growth increase the debt-to-GDP ratio? One reason is just algebraic. The ratio has a numerator (debt) and denominator (GDP): any fall in GDP will mechanically boost the ratio.  Even if GDP growth doesn’t become negative, continuous growth in debt coupled with a GDP growth slowdown will also lead to a rise in the debt-to-GDP ratio.
 
Besides, there is also a less mechanical story. A recession leads to increased spending through automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance. And governments usually finance these using greater borrowing, as undergraduate macro-economics textbooks tell us governments should do. This is what happened in the U.S. during the past recession. For all of these reasons, we should expect reverse causality to be a problem here, and these bivariate plots are consistent with such a story.
 
Of course, these are just bivariate plots. To get the econometrics right, when looking at correlations between current period debt-to-GDP ratio and past or future GDP growth, you should also account for past or future debt-to-GDP ratio.
 
A standard way of doing this is using a "distributed lag" model - which just means regressing GDP growth on a set of leads and lags in debt to GDP ratio, and then forming an "impulse response" from, say, a hypothetical 10 point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio (where 100 is when the debt level is equal to GDP).
 
Figure 3 below reports these impulse responses. What we find is exactly the pattern consistent with reverse causality.
 
The way to read this graph is to go from left to right. Here “-3” is 3 years before a 10 point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio, “-2” is 2 years before the increase, etc.   The graph shows that GDP growth rates were unusually low and falling prior to the 10 point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio.  If you average the growth differentials from the 3 years prior to the increase in debt, (i.e., the values associated with -3,-2,-1 on the X-axis), it is –0.6 (or 6/10 of a percent lower growth than usual) and statistically significant at the 5 percent level. In contrast, the average growth rates from years 1, 2 and 3+ after the 10 point increase in debt-to-GDP ratio is 0.2 (or 2/10 of one percent) higher than usual. 
 
Figure 3: Impulse Response of GDP Growth from a 10-point increase in Debt-to-Income Ratio

So what does this all show?  It shows that purely in terms of correlations, a 10 point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio in the RR data is associated with a 6/10 of a percentage point lower growth in the 3 years prior to the increase, but actually a slightly larger than usual growth in the few years after the increase. During the year of the increase in debt-to-GDP ratio, GDP growth is really low, consistent with the algebraic effect of lower growth leading to a higher debt-to-GDP ratio.

All in all, these simple exercises suggest that the raw correlation between debt-to-GDP ratio and GDP growth probably reflects a fair amount of reverse casualty. We can’t simply use correlations like those used by RR (or ones presented here) to identify causal estimates.

[Aside:  For those who are more econometrically inclined, here is the picture with country and year fixed effects to soak up some of the heterogeneity.  Not much different. By the way, the standard errors in the panel regressions are clustered by country.]

----
Addendum.
 
Labor economists have long recognized that falling values of the outcome can sometimes precede the treatment. In the job training literature this is known as an "Ashenfelter dip." Those with a fall in earnings are more likely to enter training programs, creating a spurious negative correlation between training and wages. This has similarity to the problem of debt and growth studied here.
 
One way in which economists control for such dips is by including the lagged outcome as a control.  In this case, we can control for a 1-year lagged GDP growth using a partial linear model. This still allows for a nonlinear relationship between GDP growth and debt-to-GDP ratio like in the bivariate case, but in addition controls for last period's growth.
 
Here's the picture:
Controlling for the previous year's GDP growth largely erases the negative relationship between debt-to-GDP ratio and GDP growth, especially for the range where debt is 30 percent or more of GDP.  This is because a fall in GDP precedes the rise in Debt-to-GDP ratio. This is yet another demonstration that the simple bivariate negative correlation is driven in substantial part by reverse causality.

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[Mike Konczal here.  Yesterday I wrote about a paper by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin of University of Massachusetts, Amherst. They replicated the influential Reinhart/Rogoff paper Growth in a Time of Debt. There were many responses on the internet, including Jared Bernstein, Matt Yglesias, Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, and many, many others. Reinhart and Rogoff have since responded with a statement. They believe that the findings do not "affects in any significant way the central message of the paper or that in our subsequent work." What is that message? That higher debt is associated with lower growth.

From the beginning many economists (Krugman, Bivens and Irons) have argued that their paper probably has the causation backwards: slow growth causes higher debt. But now that Herndon, Ash and Pollin have made the data used public, perhaps a talented econometrician could actually answer this? Arindrajit Dube was up for the challenge. Dube is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.]

Growth in a Time Before Debt…

Recent work by my colleagues at UMass Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin (2013)—hereafter HAP—has demonstrated that in contrast to the apparent results in Reinhart and Rogoff (2010), there is no real discontinuity or "tipping point" around 90 percent of debt-to-GDP ratio.

In their response, Reinhart and Rogoff—hereafter RR—admit to the arithmetic mistakes, but argue that the negative correlation between debt-to-GDP ratio and growth in the corrected data still supports their original contention. Taking the Stata dataset that HAP generously made available as part of their replication exercise, I first reproduced the nonparametric graph in HAP (2013) using a lowess regression (slightly different than the specific method they used). The dotted lines are 95 percent bootstrapped confidence bands.

There is a visible negative relationship between growth and debt-to-GDP, but as HAP point out, the strength of the relationship is actually much stronger at low ratios of debt-to-GDP.  This makes us worry about the causal mechanism. After all, while a nonlinearity may be expected at high ratios due to a tipping point, the stronger negative relationship at low ratios is difficult to rationalize using a tipping point dynamic.

In their response, RR state that they were careful to distinguish between association and causality in their original research. Of course, we would only really care about this association if it likely reflects causality flowing from debt to growth (i.e. higher debt leading to lower growth, the lesson many take from RR's paper).

While it is difficult to ascertain causality from plots like this, we can leverage the time pattern of changes to gain some insight. Here is a simple question: does a high debt-to-GDP ratio better predict future growth rates, or past ones?  If the former is true, it would be consistent with the argument that higher debt levels cause growth to fall. On the other hand, if higher debt "predicts" past growth, that is a signature of reverse causality.

Below I have created similar plots by regressing current year's GDP on (1) the next 3 years' average GDP growth, and (2) last three years' average GDP growth. (My .do file is available here so anyone can make these graphs. After all, if I made an error, I'd rather know about it now.)

Figure 2:  Future and Past Growth Rates and Current Debt-to-GDP Ratio

As is evident, current period debt-to-GDP is a pretty poor predictor of future GDP growth at debt-to-GDP ratios of 30 or greater—the range where one might expect to find a tipping point dynamic.  But it does a great job predicting past growth.
 
This pattern is a telltale sign of reverse causality.  Why would this happen? Why would a fall in growth increase the debt-to-GDP ratio? One reason is just algebraic. The ratio has a numerator (debt) and denominator (GDP): any fall in GDP will mechanically boost the ratio.  Even if GDP growth doesn’t become negative, continuous growth in debt coupled with a GDP growth slowdown will also lead to a rise in the debt-to-GDP ratio.
 
Besides, there is also a less mechanical story. A recession leads to increased spending through automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance. And governments usually finance these using greater borrowing, as undergraduate macro-economics textbooks tell us governments should do. This is what happened in the U.S. during the past recession. For all of these reasons, we should expect reverse causality to be a problem here, and these bivariate plots are consistent with such a story.
 
Of course, these are just bivariate plots. To get the econometrics right, when looking at correlations between current period debt-to-GDP ratio and past or future GDP growth, you should also account for past or future debt-to-GDP ratio.
 
A standard way of doing this is using a "distributed lag" model - which just means regressing GDP growth on a set of leads and lags in debt to GDP ratio, and then forming an "impulse response" from, say, a hypothetical 10 point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio (where 100 is when the debt level is equal to GDP).
 
Figure 3 below reports these impulse responses. What we find is exactly the pattern consistent with reverse causality.
 
The way to read this graph is to go from left to right. Here “-3” is 3 years before a 10 point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio, “-2” is 2 years before the increase, etc.   The graph shows that GDP growth rates were unusually low and falling prior to the 10 point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio.  If you average the growth differentials from the 3 years prior to the increase in debt, (i.e., the values associated with -3,-2,-1 on the X-axis), it is –0.6 (or 6/10 of a percent lower growth than usual) and statistically significant at the 5 percent level. In contrast, the average growth rates from years 1, 2 and 3+ after the 10 point increase in debt-to-GDP ratio is 0.2 (or 2/10 of one percent) higher than usual. 
 
Figure 3: Impulse Response of GDP Growth from a 10-point increase in Debt-to-Income Ratio

So what does this all show?  It shows that purely in terms of correlations, a 10 point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio in the RR data is associated with a 6/10 of a percentage point lower growth in the 3 years prior to the increase, but actually a slightly larger than usual growth in the few years after the increase. During the year of the increase in debt-to-GDP ratio, GDP growth is really low, consistent with the algebraic effect of lower growth leading to a higher debt-to-GDP ratio.

All in all, these simple exercises suggest that the raw correlation between debt-to-GDP ratio and GDP growth probably reflects a fair amount of reverse casualty. We can’t simply use correlations like those used by RR (or ones presented here) to identify causal estimates.

[Aside:  For those who are more econometrically inclined, here is the picture with country and year fixed effects to soak up some of the heterogeneity.  Not much different. By the way, the standard errors in the panel regressions are clustered by country.]

----
Addendum.
 
Labor economists have long recognized that falling values of the outcome can sometimes precede the treatment. In the job training literature this is known as an "Ashenfelter dip." Those with a fall in earnings are more likely to enter training programs, creating a spurious negative correlation between training and wages. This has similarity to the problem of debt and growth studied here.
 
One way in which economists control for such dips is by including the lagged outcome as a control.  In this case, we can control for a 1-year lagged GDP growth using a partial linear model. This still allows for a nonlinear relationship between GDP growth and debt-to-GDP ratio like in the bivariate case, but in addition controls for last period's growth.
 
Here's the picture:
Controlling for the previous year's GDP growth largely erases the negative relationship between debt-to-GDP ratio and GDP growth, especially for the range where debt is 30 percent or more of GDP.  This is because a fall in GDP precedes the rise in Debt-to-GDP ratio. This is yet another demonstration that the simple bivariate negative correlation is driven in substantial part by reverse causality.

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  

 

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