The Export-Import Bank

I just got back from Utah, where I was one of the speakers at a conference that has been dubbed "Club Mitt." One of the other speakers--this one a politician rather than a nerdy academic like me--spoke about the need to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank.  (I won't mention the person's name, since the event is off the record.)  What struck me is how weak the arguments were. 

Three arguments for the Ex-Im Bank were given:

1. It creates jobs.  Of course it does!  If the government were to put the names of all businesses into a hat, pull out a few randomly, and give those a per unit subsidy, those businesses would expand and hire more workers. That would not make it a good policy, however, because the wrong jobs would be created.

2. It returns money to the Treasury.  Really?  If the bank were truly a profitable venture, we could privatize it.  I bet if the government tried to sell off the Ex-Im Bank, it wouldn't get much, if anything at all.  If the Bank's activity were actually profitable, we wouldn't need a government-run bank to do it.

3. Other countries give similar subsidies to their firms. So what? If other nations engage in corporate welfare, that is no reason for the United States to follow suit in the name of a level playing field.  We don't need to import other nations' bad policies.

Maybe there are better arguments for the Export-Import Bank.  But if this is the best advocates of the Bank can do, it shouldn't be reauthorized.

Congratulations, Doug!

From ec 10 section leader to...(a few other jobs along the way)...to Dean of the Kennedy School.  I am delighted that Doug Elmendorf will be returning to Harvard.

The labor market gets tighter

 Click on graphic to enlarge.

Do you want to win a teaching prize?

If so, click here.

Claudia Goldin

An interview with my Harvard colleague.

The EITC is better than the minimum wage

Warren Buffett has a great article in the Wall Street Journal.

Alternatives to the Price System

This article makes the case for social, rather than financial, incentives. I am not convinced, but it should generate an interesting class discussion.

Bill Clinton in Haiti

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick Moynihan, a Catholic deacon who is the president of The Haitian Project and head of its Louverture Cleary School, in Haiti, for gifted but poor children. Our paths crossed because Patrick was helping to launch a course in introductory economics at the school, and my publisher generously donated copies of my favorite textbook.

Patrick recently sent me a link to his article about the role Bill Clinton has played in Haiti. It is not a pretty picture.

Hear Me Squawk

From Richard Thaler

A great article in today's NY Times.

Why I invest in index funds

The NY Times reports:

For investors in hedge funds, like big pension funds, 2014 was not a lucrative year. But for those who managed their money, the pay was spectacular. 

The top 25 hedge fund managers reaped $11.62 billion in compensation in 2014, according to an annual ranking published on Tuesday by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine. 

That collective payday came even as hedge funds, once high-octane money makers, returned on average low-single digits. In comparison, the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index posted a gain of 13.68 percent last year when reinvested dividends were included.... 

For investors, 2014 was the sixth consecutive year that hedge funds have fallen short of stock market performance, returning only 3 percent on average.

Where I will be on Monday

Here: 40 years later- The relevance of Okun’s "Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff"

TPP is a trade agreement

Oddly, Paul Krugman thinks that TPP is not really about trade. CEA Chair Jason Furman, however, writes the following:

The starting point of TPP is the contrast between U.S. tariffs and those of our partner countries. Our trade-weighted average applied tariff rate is 1.4 percent and 70 percent of imports already enter our economy duty free. In contrast, on average, our TPP partners report simple average applied tariffs 1.5 percentage points higher than our equivalent rate. In some TPP countries, average tariffs are up to 4 percentage points higher, though this difference masks considerable industry-specific variation; the United States faces tariffs of up to 30 percent on auto exports to Malaysia and 40 percent on agricultural goods to Vietnam. Many TPP countries also have substantially higher non-tariff barriers, particularly in the area of services trade, where the United States maintains a strong comparative advantage. As a result, TPP will disproportionately decrease foreign barriers to U.S. exports....  

The most comprehensive estimates of the benefits of TPP are those of Peter Petri, Michael Plummer, and Fan Zhai, who employ an 18-sector, 24-region computable general equilibrium model to simulate policy changes in more than twenty different areas including tariffs, non-tariff barriers, and rules governing foreign direct investment. They find that by 2025, TPP would raise U.S. incomes by 0.4 percent per year, the equivalent of $77 billion in 2007 dollars, although the actual estimate could vary somewhat depending on the details of the agreement and alternative modelling assumptions. The European Union has said that the United States would gain a comparable amount from T-TIP. Some have described these totals as small, but I think I would risk losing my license to offer economic advice if I counseled anyone to leave $77 billion lying on the sidewalk each year.

The Case for Trade

Click here to read my piece in Sunday's NY Times.

Congratulations, Roland

Roland Fryer has won the John Bates Clark Award.  The past three winners have been Roland Fryer (Harvard faculty), Matthew Gentzkow (Harvard undergrad and PhD), and Raj Chetty (Harvard undergrad, PhD, and faculty).

Why I favor estate tax repeal

This past week, The House of Representatives passed repeal of the estate tax.  This is a policy change I have long supported, for reasons explained here.

Advice from Larry Katz

Via Nicholas Kristof:

“A broad liberal arts education is a key pathway to success in the 21st-century economy,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. Katz says that the economic return to pure technical skills has flattened, and the highest return now goes to those who combine soft skills — excellence at communicating and working with people — with technical skills.

“So I think a humanities major who also did a lot of computer science, economics, psychology, or other sciences can be quite valuable and have great career flexibility,” Katz said. “But you need both, in my view, to maximize your potential. And an economics major or computer science major or biology or engineering or physics major who takes serious courses in the humanities and history also will be a much more valuable scientist, financial professional, economist, or entrepreneur.”

Jeff Sachs defends David Cameron

Here.

The Sticky-Price Victory

Noah Smith on "What causes recessions?"

A Libertarian Coalition?

Paul Krugman says there aren't enough libertarians in the U.S. to make a libertarian candidate like Rand Paul viable.  I am not so sure about the paucity of libertarians, but even so, I doubt that Rand Paul is the best representative of that group.

Similar to Krugman, I would define a libertarian voter as one who leans left on social issues (such as same-sex marriage) and right on economic issues (such as taxes and regulation). I certainly put myself in that camp, and I don't think I am as lonely as Krugman suggests. I meet lots of students with similar views (though, admittedly, Harvard students are hardly a representative sample of voters).

Nonetheless, I think libertarian candidates face several challenges. In particular, the Republican party has traditionally relied on an uneasy coalition of economic and social conservatives.  A libertarian candidate would need to put together a very different coalition.

Rand Paul does not seem ready to do that.  He has come out opposed to same-sex marriage, for example.  He is unlikely to put together a new coalition with that position.

Many libertarian voters I know (including those students) often vote for Democratic candidates because they weight the social issues more than the economic ones. I usually vote for Republican candidates because I weight the economic issues more than the social ones.

One reason is that I don't view the Democratic Party as a leader on social issues.  Remember that Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act.  Barack Obama was against same-sex marriage when he ran for President, and then he "evolved" (aka flip-flopped) on the issue.  On this social issue and many others, our elected leaders are really followers. The leaders are the American people.

Interview with Dani Rodrik

Here.

Economics Jokes

From Planet Money.

California should raise the price of water

There has been a lot of discussion of the drought in California and the new regulations that the state is putting in place.  But there has been little mention of the obvious (to an economist) solution: Raise the price of water.

This would do more than any set of regulations ever could.  For example, the governor is not going to force people to replace their old toilets with newer, more water-efficient ones.  But a higher price of water would encourage people to do that.  A higher price would also give farmers the right incentive to grow the most water-efficient crops. It would induce entrepreneurs to come up with new water-saving technologies. And so on.

Some may worry about the distributional effects of a higher price of a necessity.  But the revenue from a higher price could be rebated to consumers on a lump-sum basis, making the whole system progressive.  We would end up with more efficiency and more equality.

Generic Economic News

HT:MR.

Where I am today

Here, in New York City, helping promote economics education.

More Competition

Ben Bernanke has started a blog. Where did he ever come up with that title?

The Economics of Skyscrapers

A friend points me to this article in The Economist about the economics of skyscrapers.  Lots of good food for thought for micro and macro classes.

Getting Promoted

What do Larry Summers, Doug Elmendorf, and Greg Mankiw have in common?

Only one of us won a John Bates Clark Medal.
Only one of us became Director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Only one of us wrote a best-selling textbook.

But all three of us were ec 10 section leaders early in our careers.

Being an ec 10 section leader is one of the best teaching jobs at Harvard. You can revisit the principles of economics, mentor some of the world’s best undergraduates, and hone your speaking skills. In your section, you might even have the next Andrei Shleifer or Ben Bernanke (two well-known ec 10 alums). And believe it or not, we even pay you for this!

If you are a graduate student at Harvard or another Boston-area university and have a strong background in economics, I hope you will consider becoming a section leader in ec 10 next year.  Applications are encouraged from PhD students, law students, and master's students in business and public policy.

If you think you might be interested, please come to one of the information sessions we are holding:

1. Monday, March 30th at 6 p.m. in Aldrich 109 at the Harvard Business School
2. Thursday, April 2nd at 6 p.m. in the 3rd floor Littauer lounge of the Harvard Economics Department
3. Monday, April 6th at 6 p.m. in Taubman 401 at the the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
   

My Spring Break Reading

This week is spring break at Harvard, so I have time to catch up on some pleasure reading. First up is a recent recommendation by a blog reader: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. 

The book is a few years old, but I had not heard of it. It gives readers a lens into the field of moral psychology, together with dashes of philosophy, anthropology, behavioral genetics, political science,  and even some behavioral economics.

It is a great read.  Highly recommended.

3-14-15

Happy Pi Day!

Harvard Pre-Collegiate Economics Challenge

If you teach high school economics, you will most definitely want to click here to learn about a great opportunity for your students.

An Open Letter

March 5, 2015

The Honorable John Boehner

Speaker
House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

The Honorable Mitchell McConnell
Majority Leader
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
 
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Minority Leader
House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
 
The Honorable Harry Reid
Minority Leader
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Mr. Speaker, Mr. Leader, Madam Pelosi, and Senator Reid:

International trade is fundamentally good for the U.S. economy, beneficial to American families over time, and consonant with our domestic priorities. That is why we support the renewal of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) to make it possible for the United States to reach international agreements with our economic partners in Asia through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and in Europe through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Trade Promotion Authority provides for an up or down vote on these agreements, without amendments, and thereby encourages our trade partners to put their best offers on the table.

Expanded trade through these agreements will contribute to higher incomes and stronger productivity growth over time in both the United States and other countries.  U.S. businesses will enjoy improved access to overseas markets, while the greater variety of choices and lower prices trade brings will allow household budgets to go further to the benefit of American families.

Trade is beneficial for our society as a whole, but the benefits are unevenly distributed and some people are negatively affected by increased global competition.  The economy-wide benefits resulting from increased trade provide resources to make progress on important social goals, including helping those who are adversely affected.

Increased global economic engagement will enhance U.S. global leadership in line with our values. Indeed, trade agreements signed under both Democratic and Republican Presidents have included provisions to combat corruption and to strengthen environment and labor standards.

It is not desirable for trade agreements to include provisions aimed at so-called currency manipulation. This is because monetary policy affects the value of currencies.  Attempts to penalize countries for supposedly manipulating exchange rates would thus impose constraints on U.S. monetary policy, to the detriment of all Americans.

We believe that agreements to foster greater international trade are in our national economic and security interests, and support a renewal of Trade Promotion Authority.

Alan Greenspan

Charles L. Schultze

Martin Feldstein

Michael J. Boskin

Laura D’Andrea Tyson

Martin N. Baily

R. Glenn Hubbard

N. Gregory Mankiw

Harvey S. Rosen

Ben S. Bernanke

Edward P. Lazear

Christina D. Romer

Austan D. Goolsbee

Alan B. Krueger

 

The letter writers were chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

The Lee-Rubio Tax Reform

Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio announced a bold and attractive tax plan today. I especially appreciate their desire to eliminate the current tax code's bias for debt over equity finance.

No Way to Avoid It

In my column on dynamic scoring, I wrote:

[A]ccurate dynamic scoring requires more information than congressional proposals typically provide. For example, if a member of Congress proposes a tax cut, a key issue in estimating its effect is how future Congresses will respond to the reduced revenue. 

This raises important questions for which we have no easy answers. In the coming years, will these Congresses respond quickly to the revenue shortfall, or will they let budget deficits fester? When they act to close the budget gap, will they increase taxes, or will they cut spending? If they cut spending, will it be on consumption items, such as health care for the elderly, or on growth-promoting investments, such as education for the young? The impact of the initial tax cut depends crucially on the answers to these questions, but budget analysts usually have little to go on but speculation.

On this passage, John Cochrane comments:

Greg also opined on the second round effects, how policy might change economic outcomes which might change future policy. Here I'll go with the old fashioned approach -- let's not go there!

I understand the desire not to go there.  The problem is, you cannot avoid going there. 

Dynamic scoring requires the solution of a general equilibrium model.  To solve a dynamic GE model, you need to specify how the government is going to satisfy its present-value budget constraint. You might be tempted to ask the model what happens if the government cuts taxes and never does anything else. But you won't get very far. The model will tell you that the government has to do something else eventually, and it won't tell you what will happen if the government tries to do something impossible.

On Dynamic Scoring

Click here to read my column in Sunday's New York Times.

Sentence of the Day

"genetic differences explained roughly 33% of the variations in individual savings rates."

Read more here.

What matters more--the productivity slowdown or the inequality increase?

The Economic Report of the President was released today.  A friend draws my attention to Table 1-3 on page 34, which presents several historical counterfactuals.  It finds:

1. If productivity growth had not slowed after 1973, the median household would have $30,000 of additional income today.

2. If income inequality had not increased after 1973, the median household would have $9,000 of additional income today.

So, which is the bigger problem? (Of course, neither has an easy solution.)

Nobel Prize for Sale

I don't know the story behind this, but apparently a Kuznets heir is selling his Nobel Prize.

Update 2/24: With less than 2 days to go, no one has offered the minimum bid of $150,000.

Update 2/26: Someone offers the minimum bid.

Update 2/27: It goes for $390,848.

Goodbye, secular stagnation: This is not the picture of an economy with lots of slack

Good News

The Crimson reports on the good judgment of Harvard students:

Defending Pete Carroll

Justin Wolfers says that, by the logic of game theory, the losing Superbowl coach does not deserve all the opprobrium he has been getting.  I have been thinking the same thing.

Econ Conference for Undergrads

If you are an undergraduate, this conference may be of interest.

Competition and Cooperation

A nice essay by Tim Taylor, very appropriate for introductory students.

The Rise of the Inequality Debate

Professor Lars Syll thinks I made of fool of myself in a previous post when I wondered why we have only recently started discussing income inequality so extensively, even though the increase in inequality occurred mainly between 1980 and 2000.  He writes, "Wonder on which planet Greg has been living the last twenty years."

Of course, we economists have been discussing the topic for a long time. Indeed, I had a whole chapter on income inequality in the first edition of my favorite textbook, which came out about 20 years ago.  But the public has been discussing the topic widely only recently.

To document this fact for Professor Syll, I used the NY Times's very cool chronicle website to generate the chart below. As you can see, the percentage of NYT articles that uses the word "inequality" has increased more than ten-fold in the past few years.  So has the percentage that uses the phrase "income inequality."

By the way, the earlier blip in the use of "inequality" was in 1866, the year of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.  The inequality being discussed then was political, not economic.  The wide discussion of "income inequality" is unprecedented and very recent.

Economic Theory Summer Camp

Grad students with an interest in economic theory should click here.

History of Economics Summer Camp

Grad students with an interest in the history of economic thought should click here.

Ec 10 Guest Lectures

Above are the seven guest lecturers for ec 10 this spring. How many do you recognize?  A first-class econonerd would recognize them all.

Hint: Their initials are MF, GG, AA, AS, JS, JS, and LS.

Price Theory Summer Camp

This seems like a great opportunity for econ grad students.

The One Percent, Updated

Piketty and Saez have updated their famous one-percent graph to 2013.  It is above. (Click on graphic to enlarge.)

One thing that commentators sometimes fail to notice is that the big increase in the one percent's income share came between 1980 and 2000. Since 2000, it has fluctuated but without much of a trend.  Why, then, are we all talking about income inequality only now? I am not sure. One hypothesis is that we don't worry about inequality when everyone is doing well. Another hypothesis is that we now have a president with a political ideology that sees inequality as especially pernicious.

The 2014 Employment Boom

Why did employment grow by about 3 million in 2014?  Here is the answer from a new paper:

We measure the effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment. We exploit the variation induced by the decision of Congress in December 2013 not to reauthorize the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Recession. Federal benefit extensions that ranged from 0 to 47 weeks across U.S. states at the beginning of December 2013 were abruptly cut to zero. To achieve identification we use the fact that this policy change was exogenous to cross-sectional differences across U.S. states and we exploit a policy discontinuity at state borders. We find that a 1% drop in benefit duration leads to a statistically significant increase of employment by 0.0161 log points. In levels, 1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut.

Lazear on Wage Stagnation

Eddie writes:

The share of the private workforce employed in the BLS-defined industries “financial activities” and “hospitals” decreased by about 5% between 2010 and 2014. Jobs in these industries pay 29% and 24%, respectively, above the economy mean. Because a smaller share of labor is working those high-wage industries, the typical job in the economy is now lower-paying than in 2010.... 

So what accounts for the relative decline in jobs in high-wage hospitals and finance? One obvious possibility is increased regulation. The Affordable Care Act for hospitals and Dodd-Frank for finance both passed in 2010, the year real wages began to decline.

The Rise of Economists

Justin Wolfers documents:

in recent years around one in 100 [New York Times] articles mentions the term “economist,” ....Far fewer articles mention the terms historian or psychologist, while sociologists, anthropologists and demographers rarely rate a mention.

The most fiscally responsible country

As seen by Larry Kotlikoff.

What good are economists?

Bob Shiller gives a nice answer.

Leave the laptop in your dorm

I have long been skeptical about students using laptops in class to take notes. I had the sense that their brains were less engaged and that they were acting more like stenographers than students.  But I was not entirely sure my hunch was right. 

According to research described in this article, it was.

News from Amazon

Here are a few screen shots taken from Amazon today.

To users of my favorite textbooks: Thank you!  Have a great semester.

The New Economics of the Left

According to this article, some members of the Democratic party are moving from mainstream to heterodox economic theory. If Bernie Sanders runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, as now appears likely, this development should keep things entertaining for us econonerds.

Jeff Sachs on Paul Krugman

Here.

An Odd Question

Those who attended either of the sessions I was involved with at the ASSA meeting know that the audience included some hecklers.  During the first session, I was the target. During the second, Larry Summers was. (At one point, the moderator Bob Hall threatened to call security.)  Here is a Washington Post article about the hecklers.

After the first session was over, one of the hecklers came up to me and asked, "How much money have the Koch brothers paid you?"  My answer, of course, was "not a penny."

I don't find it odd that people disagree with me. I am always open to the possibility that I am wrong about lots of things, and I much enjoy talking with students and colleagues who have views different from mine. But I do find it odd that people who disagree with me are sometimes quick to question my sincerity. If I am wrong, it is sincere wrong-headedness, not the result of being on some plutocrat's payroll, as some on the left want to believe.

The hecklers probably limit their own effectiveness by questioning the motives of those who disagree with them. I have found that to convince other people, it is usually best not to assume your own moral superiority but rather to talk with them as equals who just happen to have a different point of view.

Me at the ASSA Meeting

I have a busy few days at the upcoming ASSA meeting in Boston.  For those interested, I will be involved in the following public events:

Jan 03, 2015 8:00 am, Sheraton Boston, Independence Ballroom
American Economic Association

A Discussion of Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" (D3)

 

Presiding: N. Gregory Mankiw (Harvard University)

 

Capital and Wealth in the 21st Century

David N. Weil (Brown University)

[Download Preview]

TBD

 

Capital Taxation in the 21st Century

Alan J. Auerbach (University of California-Berkeley)

Kevin Hassett (American Enterprise Institute)

[Download Preview]

TBD

 

Yes, r>g. So what?

N. Gregory Mankiw (Harvard University)

[Download Preview]

Piketty argues that r>g is the “the central contradiction of capitalism” and that it will lead to an “endless inegalitarian spiral.” As a result, he argues for a new global tax on capital. In this brief essay, I explain why I am not persuaded by either his prediction or his prescription.

 

About Capital in the 21st century

Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics)

[Download Preview]

TBD

Jan 03, 2015 2:30 pm, Sheraton Boston, Independence Ballroom
American Economic Association

The Economics of Secular Stagnation (A1)

 

Presiding: Robert E. Hall (Stanford University)

 

Secular Stagnation: A Supply Side View

Robert Gordon (Northwestern University)

TBD

 

Secular Stagnation: A Demand Side View

Lawrence H. Summers (Harvard University)

TBD

 

Does History Lend Any Support to the Secular Stagnation Hypothesis?

Barry Eichengreen (University of California-Berkeley)

[Download Preview]

TBD

 

Discussants:

Robert E. Hall (Stanford University)

William Nordhaus (Yale University)

N. Gregory Mankiw (Harvard University)