Category Archives: Tyler Cowen is my Favorite Blogger

Houses and Land

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Kevin Erdmann writes,

The real long term natural rate right now is about 2.5%. If you have tons of cash or you can run the gauntlet and get a mortgage, or if you are an institituional investor going through the difficult organizational process of buying up billions of dollars of rental homes, you get the preferred rate of 4% real returns.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Erdmann thinks that we have not built enough houses, so rents will be rising, so owning rental property is a great investment. My comments:

1. I would have thought so, too. I put a lot of money in REITs. It has not done well. I also invested a lot of money in firms that own/manage a lot of apartments. It did not do well. Maybe all that says is that I played in a segment of the market that is efficient, when the point is to try to exploit the inefficient segment.

2. If I understand his thinking, there are not enough buyers to bid house prices to their fair market value. So you can own an apartment building at a high rent/price ratio. But it seems to me that, at least in some markets, the price/rent ratio has gone up rather than down in the past few years.

3. I am not sure that I trust my intuition about housing markets. My friends and relatives tend to be located in Blue cities where regulation restricts supply. I do not have a good feel for less-regulated markets.

Saving and Investment with Rapid Depreciation

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Tyler Cowen writes,

it seems to me highly premature to assume we know what is going on with short-term negative real rates

Let me try to tell the disinflation story again. Suppose that most capital goods these days have computing devices built into them. Consequently, there is rapid improvement in capital. This in turn means that:

1. Today’s capital goods are much more productive then yesterday’s.

2. The real price of capital goods is falling over time.

3. Depreciation of existing capital goods is rapid. What you buy today is obsolete in a few years.

I teach students a basic formula for the profitability of buying a durable good:

profitability = rental rate + appreciation – interest cost

Suppose that the rental rate on new capital is very high. That is, it is very productive. However, the appreciation rate is very negative. You may need a negative interest rate to convince you that it is profitable to obtain capital.

What else would be true if this were the story? Assets that do not depreciate would be very attractive. So if you believe that real estate does not depreciate, you want to invest in it. If you believe that corporate “brand value” does not depreciate it, you want to buy shares in firms that have a lot of brand value.

More needs to be worked out.

Solution Disconnected from Problem

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From a WSJ profile of Raj Chetty.

High-mobility metro areas have a combination of greater economic and racial integration, better schools and a smaller fraction of single-parent families than lower-mobility areas. Integration is lagging in Atlanta, he said. “The strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure,” Mr. Chetty said.

His proposal: move poor children to high-mobility communities and remove the impediments to mobility in poor-performing neighborhoods. He now is working with the Obama administration on ways to encourage landlords in higher-opportunity neighborhoods to take in poor families by paying landlords more or guaranteeing rent payment.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The problem is family structure. The solution is engineering the spatial/income distribution of households. The connection is not there for me.

And if the problem is a need to improve teacher quality, then the solution is not for economists to run regressions on test scores. The solution is to put the power in the hands of people who care about quality and are close to the situation (i.e., parents), not in the hands of teachers’ unions.

Heterogeneity of Firms and Workers, Scarcity of Management Talent

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Jason Furman and Peter Orszag write,

Longstanding evidence (e.g. Krueger and Summers 1988) has documented substantial inter-industry differentials in pay—a mid-level analyst may have the same marginal product wherever he or she works but is paid more at a high-return company than at a low-return company. Newer evidence (Barth et al. 2014 and Song et al. 2015) suggests that much of the rise in earnings inequality represents the increased dispersion of earnings between firms rather than within firms. This is consistent with the combination of a rising dispersion of returns at the firm level and the inter-industry pay differential model, as well as with the notion that firms are wage setters rather than wage takers in a less-than-perfectly-competitive marketplace.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I bristle at the phrase “same marginal product.” Modern workers are not widget-makers, and their value inside an organization is not visible to people outside the organization. Indeed, even within the organization, the value contributed by individual workers cannot be calculated with any precision.

I know someone, call him A, who works in information technology at a firm in a buggy-whip industry. One of his friends, call him B, just took a job at Google. Assume, probably correctly, that the difference between their two compensation packages is a lot wider than the difference in their skills. Some possibilities:

1. This is a disequilibrium situation. Information technology workers currently produce more value at Google than in the buggy-whip industry. In equilibrium, A will move out of the buggy-whip industry and go to work for Google.

2. This is an “efficiency-wage” equilibrium, in which Google pays B slightly more than B’s opportunity cost. This enables Google to be highly selective in who it hires and also to give B an incentive to provide top performance.

I am inclined toward (2). But in either case, the value of B’s work is high relative to B’s wage, which raises the question of why Google does not hire more engineers. Perhaps the value of the next engineer would be lower, because of management limitations at Google.

I think that the key factor here is that the collective management talent assembled at Google is scarce. It generates more value that the collective management talent at the firm in the buggy-whip industry.

What I am suggesting is that the value of a firm depends a great deal on collective management talent. This includes the skills of individual key executives as well as the team chemistry among them.

One of the challenges of maintaining a high-functioning management team is that the “tournament” to get to the top can become corrupt. That is, managers can start to get ahead by undermining other managers rather than by exercising better judgment. As this sort of corruption becomes widespread, a firm can rapidly deteriorate. For me, this is one of the most interesting phenomena in the sociology of organizations.

Market Denialism

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Jayson Lusk and Pierre Desrochers write,

In a recent paper, Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell (2015; Front Ecol Environ 13[5]: 244–248) present a simulation study that assesses the technological feasibility of providing enough local calories to feed every American. In so doing, they suggest turning back the clock on one of Homo sapiens sapiens’ greatest evolutionary achievements: the ability to trade physical goods over increasingly longer distances, producing an attending ever-widening division of labor (Horan et al. 2005). The main benefit of this process is that one hundred people who specialize and engage in trade end up producing and consuming far more than one hundred times what any one individual would achieve on his or her own. By spontaneously relocating food production to regions with higher biotic potential for specific types of crops and livestock in order to optimize the overall use of resources, trade and the division of labor have delivered more output at lower costs.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

I am stunned by the casual way in which environmentalists dismiss the information that markets provide concerning costs. They instead substitute their own cost estimates.

Some further thoughts:

1. If you really have a better estimate of costs than the market, then there should be profit opportunity. In the case of locavorism, you should be able to offer local food for lower prices. Do any locavorists stop to wonder why food that comes from far away cost less? Do they suppose it is some perverse conspiracy on the part of “big food” to subsidize the transportation industry (or perhaps the other way around)?

2. Consider recycling. At a local elementary school, I saw the winning poster in a county contest to promote recycling. The poster pictured a barren, brown earth, and said that this is what would happen if we did not recycle. And yet, economically, government-forced recycling is unsustainable, and it probably results in a net cost to environmental desiderata. (I wonder if people on the left would be so attached to government-run schools if the propaganda coming from those schools offended them.)

3. Consider two extremes: “free-market fundamentalism,” which says that markets always lead to optimal outcomes; and “market denialism,” which I will define as the belief that the information found in markets is of so little importance that one’s personal opinions should take precedence. I think that in practice market denialism is much more prevalent than free-market fundamentalism. In fact, it is so prevalent that no one refers to it as “market denialism.” They just presume that it is the appropriate point of view.

Related: Clive Crook cites Dani Rodrik‘s 10 commandments for economists.

“Substituting your values for the public’s is an abuse of your expertise.”

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. And how can Rodrik be immune from “abuse of your expertise”?

More Thoughts on Economic Methods

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Diane Coyle writes,

Rodrik supports the mathematical nature of economics as bringing clarity of meaning, and argues that the subject is far more applied and empirical than its detractors realise. But he criticises large-scale macro models and time series regressions. “I cannot think of an important economic insight that has come out of such models,” he writes. He also flags up the lack of testability of many economic models: they purport to be deductions from theoretical principles, but as they are ‘deduced’ to explain a particular phenomenon (credit rationing, say), then that phenomenon cannot be used to test the model. “Very few of the models that economists work with have ever been rejected so decisively that the profession discarded them as clearly false.”

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

My line is that economists deal in non-falsifiable interpretive frameworks. Read Coyle’s entire post. She makes Rodrik sound like someone I would agree with, although not everything I have read of him would indicate that.

The conversation between Tyler Cowen and Dani Rodrik keeps circling back to methodological issues. For example, Rodrik is wary of overrating randomized control trials. Rodrik suggests that graduate students should spend more time in the real world.

I keep thinking of the quote of Minsky writing that economists are well trained but not well educated. You are trained to solve equations. Nowadays you are trained to do the sort of narrow empirical studies that Rodrik thinks are overrated. But you are not educated in history or financial institutions or secular changes in the economy.

Also, Noah Smith has more to say.

philosophical empiricism is far more frightening for economists than for natural scientists. Living in a world of theoryderp is easy and comforting. Moving from that world into a Popperian void of uncertainty and frustration is a daunting prospect. But that is exactly what the credibility revolution demands.

Read the whole post. As I read it, he thinks that economists will have to reconcile themselves to less theory and more empirical work. I do not really agree:

1. I think that economists rely a lot on what I call interpretive frameworks. These do not have standing in philosophical empiricism, because they are not falsifiable.

2. Philosophical empiricism does not provide a guide to evaluating interpretive frameworks. Unfortunately, economists have not thought about this question. Frameworks become popular because they are tractable or interesting, and they stay popular without ever being evaluated for usefulness.

3. I think that an interpretive framework is strong if it offers explanations in many contexts, if it does not encounter too many anomalies (phenomena that seem to run counter to the framework), and if it is reinforced by other beliefs.

4. Supply and demand is an example of an interpretive framework that is very strong. That is, it seems to explain a lot, one rarely encounters anomalies, and it is consistent with other beliefs that we tend to hold.

5. Keynesian macro is an example of an interpretive framework that is not very strong. Many anomalies have cropped up over the decades: the ability of the U.S. economy to rebound after World War II in spite of the staggering drop in government spending; the breakdown of the Phillips Curve in the 1970s; the failure of many Keynesian stimulus policies in many countries, including the U.S. And Keynesian macro is notoriously inconsistent with many other beliefs that economists tend to hold.

The Third C is Conscientiousness

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Broadly speaking, our results point to a quantitatively large and significant role for credit scores in the formation and dissolution of committed relationships. Three sets of empirical results support this conclusion: First, credit scores are positively correlated with the likelihood of forming a committed relationship and its subsequent stability. Second, partners positively sort into committed relationships along the credit score dimension even after controlling for other similarities between the partners. Third, a positive correlation notwithstanding, within-couple differences in credit scores are apparent at the start of relationships. Notably, the initial match quality in credit scores is highly predictive of subsequent separations even when controlling for other factors, such as couples’ use of credit and the occurrence of financial distress.

Jane Dokko, Geng Li, and Jessica Hayes write,

These results lead us to hypothesize that credit scores, in addition to measuring an individual’s creditworthiness regarding the repayment of debt obligations, reveal information about an important relationship skill. We argue that one such skill could be an individual’s general trustworthiness and commitment to non-debt obligations. To make this argument, we turn to survey-based measures of trustworthiness to show that the average credit score of a geographic area (typically a county) is highly correlated with the same area’s average level of trustworthiness. We also find that when individuals have a long exposure to greater trustworthiness, as measured by surveys, they tend to have higher credit scores even years after they leave those areas. Similar to how credit scores predict the formation and dissolution of committed relationships, we find that survey-based measures of trustworthiness also have predictive power for these outcomes. Interestingly, such statistical relevance diminishes when the couples’ credit score levels are controlled for, underscoring the overlapping between credit scores and survey-based measures of trustworthiness.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

In mortgage underwriting, they used to talk about the three C’s: collateral (the house, particularly the borrower’s equity in it), capacity (the borrower’s income relative to mortgage payments and other debt obligations), and credit history.

In fact, I think that the third C should be called conscientiousness, one of the Big Five personality traits. The authors of the paper instead use the term trustworthiness. That this trait should matter for relationship stability, and that it is well measured by credit scores, should surprise no one.

I worry that pursuit of this line of inquiry, like research on the role of IQ, will not be good for the career of a young researcher.

Blame the DA’s

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John Pfaff says,

Though we have a smaller pool of people being arrested, we’re sending a larger and larger number of them to prison.

the probability that a district attorney files a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies.

He argues that this, rather than other people’s favorite reasons, accounts for the high incarceration rate. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I still have many questions. For example, has the number of mentally unstable, violent individuals gone way up? Or has the proportion of mentally unstable, violent individuals gone way up? Do other countries, with lower prison populations, have fewer mentally unstable, violent individuals? Do they have an alternative way for dealing with such individuals that works better? etc.

Nigerian Entrepeneurs, Not a Scam

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The abstract of a study for the World Bank by economist David J. McKenzie reads

Almost all firms in developing countries have fewer than 10 workers, with the modal firm consisting of just the owner. Are there potential high-growth entrepreneurs with the ability to grow their firms beyond this size? And, if so, can public policy help alleviate the constraints that prevent these entrepreneurs from doing so? A large-scale national business plan competition in Nigeria is used to help provide evidence on these two questions. The competition was launched with much fanfare, and attracted almost 24,000 entrants. Random assignment was used to select some of the winners from a pool of semi-finalists, with US$36 million in randomly allocated grant funding providing each winner with an average of almost US$50,000. Surveys tracking applicants over three years show that winning the business plan competition leads to greater firm entry, higher survival of existing businesses, higher profits and sales, and higher employment, including increases of over 20 percentage points in the likelihood of a firm having 10 or more workers. These effects appear to occur largely through the grants enabling firms to purchase more capital and hire more labor.

Pointer ultimately from Tyler Cowen. My cynical thoughts:

1. How does one keep corruption out of such a program?

2. Does this imply that there is an unexploited profit opportunity in lending to would-be entrepreneurs in underdeveloped countries? Note that the money the firms received seems to have been in the form of grants, not loans.

The Basic Social Rule and Dissent

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From Elizabeth Warren’s book, as relayed by a review in the NYT.

After dinner, “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice,” Ms. Warren writes. “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.

Pointer from various places–I first saw it from Tyler Cowen.

Remember that the basic social rule is to reward cooperators and punish defectors. I believe that without such a social rule, trust would break down and we could not have markets. However, that does not mean that the social rule is always a wonderful thing. Criminal gangs operate the basic social rule, also–they reward people who cooperate with the gang and punish people who defect from it.

The basic social rule gets applied in politics and in academics. A visitor from Mars would have a really hard time understanding how macroeconomics got into the cul de sac in which it had arrived when Olivier Blanchard wrote that the state of macroeconomics is good. I would say that Dornbusch and Fischer were really good at rewarding cooperators and punishing defectors.