Suchergebnisse

The country's current struggles show the problems of the Beijing way—and make the case for freedom.

John Cochrane's blog has always been a favorite of mine. It's provocative. It's entertaining. And it invariably leads me to reflect on a variety of notions I have floating around in my head. In his latest piece,  he asks an interesting question: How does the Fed come up with its inflation forecast? What sort of model might be embedded in the minds of FOMC members? I like the question and the thought experiment. My comments below should not be construed as criticism. Think of them more as thoughts that come to mind in a conversation. (It's more fun to do this in public than in private.)John begins with the observation that while the Fed evidently expects inflation to decline as the Fed's policy rate is increased, at no point in the transition dynamic back to 2% inflation is the real rate of interest very high. To quote John (italics in original): the Fed believes inflation will almost entirely disappear all on its own, without the need for any period of high real interest rates. Of course, this is in sharp contrast with the Volcker disinflation, an episode that demonstrated, in the minds of many, how a persistently high real rate of interest was needed to make inflation go down (some push back in this paper here).John believes that the current inflation was generated in large part by a big fiscal shock in the form of a money transfer (an increased in USTs unsupported by the prospect of higher future taxes). I'm inclined to agree with this view, though surely there other factors playing a role (see here). John asks how this type of shock can be expected to generate a transitory inflation with the real interest rate kept (say) negative throughout the entire transition dynamic. Below, I offer a simple model that rationalizes this expectation. Whether it's the model FOMC members have in their heads, I'm not sure. (Well, I happen to know in the case of two FOMC members, but I won't share this here.)Formally, I have in mind a simple OLG model (see, here). The model is Non-Ricardian (the supply of government debt is viewed as private wealth). The model's properties are more Old Keynesian than New Keynesian. The model is also consistent with Monetarism, except with the supply of base money replaced with the supply of outside assets (i.e., all government securities--cash, reserves, bills, notes and bonds). So, I'm thinking about my model beginning in an hypothetical stationary state. The real economy is growing at some constant rate (say, zero). The supply of outside assets consists of zero interest securities (monetary policy is pegging the nominal interest rate to zero all along the yield curve). This supply of "debt" is also growing at some constant rate. Debt is never repaid--it is rolled over forever. Indeed, the nominal supply of debt is growing forever. New debt is used to finance government spending. The real primary budget deficit is held constant. The government is running a perpetual budget deficit via bond seigniorage; see here. The steady-state inflation rate in this economy is given by the rate of growth of the supply of nominal outside assets. (It is also possible that the inflation rate is determined by shifts in the demand for USTs; see here, for example). The real interest rate (on money) is negative. OK, now let's consider a large fiscal shock in the form of a one-time increase in the supply of outside assets (i.e., a helicopter drop of money that is never reversed).  The effect of this shock is to induce a transitory inflation (a permanent increase in the price-level). An increase in the nominal supply of money at a given interest rate at full employment makes the cost of living go up -- it makes the real debt go down. And oh, by the way, the debt-to-GDP ratio is declining thanks in part to inflation:This is despite the persistent negative real interest rate prevailing in the economy. I mean, what else might one imagine from a one-time injection of money? Is this is what the Fed is thinking? (This is what I'm thinking!) Note: an increase in the interest rate in this model would unleash a disinflationary force, but this would only serve to speed up the transition dynamic. As it turns out, this simple story seems consistent with what I take to be John's preferred theory of inflation. The large fiscal shock here is unaccompanied by the prospect of future primary budget surpluses. The effect is to increase the price level (i.e., a temporary inflation). Maybe the Fed has John's FTPL model in mind? Neither of these stories line up particularly well with the New Keynesian model, which emphasizes interest rate policy as *the* way inflation is controlled. There are, however, many strange things going on in this model. First, while no explicit attention is paid to fiscal policy, the fiscal regime plays a critical role in determining model dynamics (basic assumption is lump-sum taxes and Ricardian fiscal regime). Second, the Taylor principle that is needed to determine a locally unique rational expectations equilibrium is an off-equilibrium credible threat to basically blow the economy up if individuals do not coordinate on the proposed equilibrium (I learned this from John here.)  By the way, Peter Howitt provides a different (and in my view, a more compelling) explanation for the "Taylor principle" here--published a year before Taylor 1993. Given these shortcomings, why are we even using this model as a benchmark? This is another good question. John presumably picks this model because he sees no better alternative for modeling monetary policy via an interest rate rule. If he wants an alternative, he can read my paper above. Or, he can appeal to his own class of models extended to permit a liquidity function for USTs. These models easily accommodate stable inflation at negative real rates of interest. But whether this is how FOMC members organize their thinking, I'm not sure.In any case, John picks an off-the-shelf NK model and assumes that it adequately captures what is in the mind of many FOMC members. Let's see what he does next (Modeling the Fed). He writes: "The Fed clearly believes that once a shock is over, inflation stops, even if the Fed does not do much to nominal interest rates. This is the "Fisherian" property. It is not the property of traditional models. In those models, once inflation starts, it will spiral out of control unless the Fed promptly raises interest rates." [I think he meant "threatens to raise interest rates.]Comment 1: I'm not sure what he means by a "Fisherian" property. (Note: the Fisher equation holds in the OLG model I cited above--though the real rate of interest is not generally fixed in those settings.) Comment 2: Conventional models? I presume he means Woodford's basic NK model. It seems likely to me, however, that FOMC members may have other "conventional" models in their heads -- like the Old Keynesian model or the Old Monetarist model--both of which continue to be taught as standard fare in undergraduate curricula.  OK, so John considers a very basic IS-PC model and considers two alternative hypotheses for how inflation expectations are determined. The first hypothesis is a simple adaptive rule (see also Howitt's work above). The second hypothesis is perfect foresight (rational expectations) -- which, by the way, implicitly embeds knowledge of the Ricardian fiscal regime. Under the adaptive expectations model, inflation explodes. Under the rational expectations hypothesis, inflation largely follows the Fed's actual forecast. Maybe this is what the Fed is thinking? The Fed has rational expectations? Except that I'm not really sure what this means. John does give us a further hint though. He goes on to say "Not only is the Fed rational expectations, neo-Fisherian, it seems to believe that prices are surprisingly flexible!" Right. So the Neo-Fisherian hypothesis is that to get a permanently lower rate of inflation, the Fed must (at least eventually) lower its policy rate (and vice versa to raise the rate of inflation). I've questioned this hypothesis in the past (see here). But what's going on here now? Is John suggesting that the FOMC is made up of closet Neo-Fisherians? Steve Williamson would no doubt be pleasantly surprised. John writes: "The proposition that once the shock is over inflation will go away on its own may not seem so radical. Put that way, I think it does capture what's on the Fed's mind. But it comes inextricably with the very uncomfortable Fisherian implication. If inflation converges to interest rates on its own, then higher interest rates eventually raise inflation, and vice-versa." No, I'm afraid the conclusion that inflation is transitory (even with negative real rates) is NOT inextricably linked to the Neo-Fisherian proposition. It is only inextricably linked this way in a class of economic models that: [1] are pretty bad; and [2] highly unlikely to be in the heads of most FOMC members. 

If Elizabeth Warren were running for presidency this year, she might not again hold up Germany as an economic model. Its economy is facing a multifaceted crisis, one marked by declining manufacturing output since 2017 due to eroding competitiveness, global economic shifts, and domestic challenges.
The post Germany Has Become an Economic Example for All the Wrong Reasons appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The passage of the appropriations bill by the United States Congress has had major implications for future generations of New Mexicans by providing funding for the state's early childhood education constitutional amendment, which was adopted by the state legislature in 2021 and supported overwhelmingly by voters in 2022. The last step to finalizing the state's…

Instead of procrastinating to the detriment of economic growth and American living standards, Congress should empower a BRAC‐​like fiscal commission now to address unsustainable government debt.

Economic freedom and openness are vital for America's prosperity, innovation, competition, and individual liberty. By embracing these principles, the country can unleash its full economic potential, create opportunities for its citizens, and keep secure its position as a global economic leader, as well as a be model for developing economies.
The post The 21st Century Decline of Economic Freedom appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

This post is from a set of comments I gave at the NBER Asset Pricing conference in early November at Stanford.  Conference agenda here. My full slides here. There was video, but sadly I took too long to write this post and the NBER took down the conference video. I was asked to comment on "Downward Nominal Rigidities and Bond Premia" by François Gourio  and Phuong Ngo. It's a very nice clean paper, so all I could think to do as discussant is praise it, then move on to bigger issues. These are really comments about whole literatures, not about one paper. One can admire the play but complain about the game. The paper implements a version of Bob Lucas' 1973 "International evidence" observation. Prices are less sticky in high inflation countries. The Phillips curve more vertical. Output is less affected by inflation. The Calvo fairy visits every night in Argentina. To Lucas, high inflation comes with variable inflation, so people understand that price changes are mostly aggregate not relative prices, and ignore them. Gourio and Ngo use a new-Keynesian model with downwardly sticky prices and wages to express the idea.  When inflation is low, we're more often in the more-sticky regime. They use this idea in a model of bond risk premia. Times of low inflation lead to more correlation of inflation and output, and so a different correlation of nominal bond returns with the discount factor, and a different term premium. I made two points, first about bond premiums and second about new-Keynesian models. Only the latter for this post. This paper, like hundreds before it, adds a few ingredients on top of a standard textbook new-Keynesian model. But that textbook model has deep structural problems. There are known ways to fix the problems. Yet we continually build on the standard model, rather than incorporate known ways or find new ways to fix its underlying problems. Problem 1: The sign is "wrong" or at least unconventional.The basic sign is wrong -- or at least counter to the standard belief of all policy makers. In the model, higher interest rates cause inflation to jump down immediately, and then rise over time. Everyone at the Fed uniformly believes that higher interest rates cause inflation to go nowhere immediately, and then gently decline over time, with "long and variable lags." Larry Ball pointed this out 30 years ago. The behavior comes straight from the forward-looking Phillips curve. Lower output goes with lower inflation, relative to future inflation. I.e. inflation rising over time. To be clear, maybe the model is right and the beliefs are wrong. It's amazing that so much modeling and empirical work has gone in to massaging theory and data to conform to Milton Friedman's 1968 proclamation of how monetary policy works. The "long and variable lags" in particular are a trouble to modern economics. If you know prices are going up tomorrow, you raise prices today. But that's for another day. This model does not behave the way most people think the economy behaves, so if you're going to use it, at least that needs a major asterisk.  Well, we know how to fix this. You can see that sneaking lagged inflation into the Phillips curve is going to be a big part of that.  Christiano Eichenbaum and Evans, 20  years ago, produced a widely cited model that "fixes" this problem. It has a lot of ingredients. Most of all, it assumes that wages and prices are indexed. Firms and workers that don't get tapped by the Calvo fairy to change their price or wage nonetheless raise by observed inflation. This gives a Phillips curve with lagged inflation. Moreover, in preferences, investment, and this Phillips curve, CEE modify the model to put growth rates in place of levels. (More review in a three part series on new-Keynesian models here.) The result: If the funds rate goes down (right panel) unexpectedly, inflation goes down just a bit but then turns around and goes up a year later. (Several other authors get to the same place by abandoning rational expectations. But that has its own problems, and it's going to be hard to incorporate asset pricing that way. Much more in Expectations and the Neutrality of Interest Rates) Great. But notice that neither Gourio and Pho nor pretty much anyone else builds on this model. We cite it, but don't use it. Instead, 20 more years of NK theorizing studies different extensions of the basic model, that don't solve the central conundrum. Problem 2: Fed induced explosionsThe standard new-Keynesian model says that if the Fed holds interest rates constant, inflation is stable -- will go away on its own -- but indeterminate. There are multiple equilibria. The standard new-Keynesian model thus assumes that the Fed deliberately destabilizes the economy. If inflation comes out more than the Fed wishes, the Fed will lead the economy to hyperinflation or hyper deflation. Under that threat, people jump to the inflation that the Fed wishes to see. But the Fed does no such thing.  Central bankers resolutely state that their job is to stabilize the economy, to bring inflation back from wherever it might go. Despite thousands of papers with new-Keynesian equations written at central banks, if anyone were ever to honestly describe those equations in the introduction, "we assume that the central bank is committed to respond to inflation by hyperinflation or deflation in order to select from multiple equilibria" they would be laughed out of a job. This has been clear, I think, since 2000 or so. I figured it out by reading Bob King's "Language and Limits." My  "Determinacy and Identification" in the JPE 2011 was all about this. We've also known at least one way to fix it, as shown: fiscal theory. OK, I'm a broken record on this topic. Instead, we go on with the same model and its underlying widely counterfactual assumption about policy. Problem 3: The fit is terribleA model consists of a set of equations, with the thing you want to determine (say, inflation) on the left, the economic causes described by the model on the right, plus "shocks," which are things your model can't capture. In the explanation part, there are parameters (\(\sigma, \ \beta, \ \kappa, \ \phi\)), that control how much the things on the right affect the things on the left. The fit of new-Keynesian models is usually terrible. In accounting for economic variables (\(x_t,\) \(\pi_t, \) \(i_t \) here), the error terms (\(\varepsilon\)) are much larger than the model's economic mechanisms (the \(x,\) \(\pi\) on the right hand side). Forecasts -- predicting  \(\pi\), \(x\) ahead of time -- is worse. For example, where did inflation come from and why did it go away? Expected inflation hasn't moved much, and the economy just plugged along. Most of the rise and fall of inflation came from inflation shocks.  Related, the fit of the models is about the same amount of terrible for different values of the parameters. That means the parameters are "poorly identified" if identified at all. That means that the mechanisms of the model -- say, how much higher interest rates lower output, and then how much lower output affects inflation -- are weak, and poorly understood. In part this isn't often noticed because we got out of the habit of evaluating models by fit in the 1980s. Most models are evaluated, as I showed above for CEE by matching select "identified" impulse response functions. But as those response functions also explain small variances of output and inflation, it's possible to match response functions well, yet still fit the data badly, i.e. fit the data only by adding big shocks to every equation. I don't know of good fixes here. Old fashioned ISLM models had similar problems (See Sims 1980). But it is a fact that we just ignore and go on. The Phillips curve is a central problem, which has only gotten worse lately. Unemployment was high and declining throughout the 2010s, with stable inflation. Inflation came with high unemployment in 2021. And inflation fell with no high real interest rates, no unemployment, and strong growth in 2022-2023. But what will replace it? So where are we?Macro is surprisingly un-cumulative. We start with a textbook model. People find some shortcomings and suggest a fix. But rather than incorporate that fix, the next paper adds a different fix to the same textbook  model. One would think we would follow the path on the right. We don't. We follow the path on the left. This is common in economics. The real business cycle literature followed much the same path. After the King Plosser Rebelo stochastic growth model became the standard, people spent a decade with one extension after another, each well motivated to fix a stylized fact. But by and large the next paper didn't build on the last one, but instead offered a new variation on the KPR model. Posteriors follow priors according to Bayes' rule, of course. So another way of putting the observation, people seem to put a pretty high prior on the original model, but don't trust the variations at all. I sin too. In Fiscal Theory of the Price Level  I married fiscal theory with the new-Keynsian IS and Phillips curve, exactly as above, despite problems #1 and #3. Well, it makes a lot of sense to change one ingredient at a time to see how a new theory works. I'm unhappy with the result, but I haven't been able to move on to a new and better textbook model, which is what has occasioned several of these related posts.  Wę need a digestion. Which of the new ingredients are reliable, robust, and belong as part of the new "textbook" model? That's not easy. Reliable and robust is very hard to find, and to persuade people. There are so many to choose from -- CEE's smorgasbord, capital, financial frictions, heterogeneous agents, different expectation formation stories, different pricing frictions,  and so on. What's the minimal easy set of these to use? Part of the trouble lies in how publishing works. It's nearly impossible to publish a paper that removes old ingredients, that digests the model down to a new textbook version. The rewards are to publishing papers that add new ingredients. Even if, like CEE, everyone cites them but doesn't use them. I've asked many economists why they build on a model with so many known problems, and why they don't include known fixes. (Not just fiscal theory!) The answer is usually, yes, I know about all these problems, but nobody will bother me about them since every other paper makes the same assumptions, and I need to get papers published.     I went on a bit of a tear here as I referee lots of great papers like this one. Every part of the paper is great, except it builds on a model with big flaws we've known about for 30 years. It feels unfair to complain about the underlying model, since the journal has published and will publish a hundred other papers. But at what point can we, collectively, scream "Stop!" The new-Keynesian model has been the standard model for an astonishing 30 years. None of ISLM, monetarism, rational expectations, or real business cycles lasted that long.  It's even more amazing that it is so unchanged in all this time. It is definitely time for a better textbook version of the model! Maybe this is a plea for Woodford, Gali or one of the other NK textbook authors, which much better command of all the variations than I have, to bless us a new textbook model. Or, perhaps it's time for something totally new. That's not fiscal theory per se. Fiscal theory is an ingredient, not a model.  You can marry it to new-Keynesian models, as I, Leeper, Sims, and others have done. But you can also marry it to old ISLM or anything else you want. Given the above, maybe there isn't an existing modification but a new start. I don't  know what that is. (My comments also have some similar comments about term premiums and how to think about them, but this post is long enough.) Update:Twitter correspondents Stéphane Surprenant and Tom Holden point me to The Transmission of Monetary Policy Shocks by Silvia Miranda-Agrippino Giovanni Ricco in the AEJ Macro, and Inflation, output and markup dynamics with purely forward-looking wage and price setters by Louis Phaneuf, Eric Sims, and Jean Gardy Victor in the European Economic Review. The former is a VAR with high frequency measurement of the monetary policy shock. And.. Source: Miranda-Agrippino and RiccoThe price level as well as the inflation rate can jump down immediately when the interest rate rises! (I think the graph plots the level of CPI, not growth rate.) That's even stronger than the baseline model in which the price level, being sticky, does not move, but the inflation rate jumps on the interest rate rise. The latter is a nice theoretical paper. It adds a lot of the CEE assumptions.  I overstated a great deal that others have not used these ingredients.  They are used in these "medium scale" models, just not in "textbook" models. However, it gets rid of indexed prices and wages with purely forward looking Phillips curves. It adds intermediate goods however. This makes prices changes work through the network of suppliers adding interesting dynamics, which has always struck me as a very important ingredient. And...Source: Phaneuf, Sims ,and VictorThe main estimate is the dark line. Here you see a model with the conventional response: inflation does not move on impact, and increases some time after the interest rate rise.  So, we can switch places! Estimates can replicate the conventional model, with an instant inflation response. Models can replicate the conventional estimates, with a slow inflation response. This one is much prettier than CEEs. 

The so-called zero-lower-bound (ZLB) plays a prominent role in modern (and even older) macroeconomic theories. It is often introduced in a paper or at conference as a fact of life -- an unavoidable property of the physical environment, like gravity. But is it correct to view it in this way? Or is the ZLB better thought of as legal constraint--something that can potentially be circumvented by policy?

The Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006 allows the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) to pay interest on reserve accounts that private banks hold at the Fed. Specifically, the Act states that:

Balances maintained at a Federal Reserve bank by or on behalf of a depository institution may receive earnings to be paid by the Federal Reserve bank at least once each calendar quarter, at a rate or rates not to exceed the general level of short-term interest rates.
The effective date of this authority was advanced to October 1, 2008, by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.

It is not clear (to me, at least) whether the Act grants the Fed the authority to pay a negative interest rate on reserves. Note that if the interest-on-reserves (IOR) rate is set to a negative number, then banks would in effect be paying the Fed a "service fee" for the privilege of holding reserve balances with the Fed. But if the Fed is not legally permitted to use negative interest rate policy (NIRP), then the ZLB is obviously a legal constraint.

This legal constraint, however, may not be binding if the ZLB is also an economic constraint. In fact, the traditional explanation for the ZLB is the existence of physical currency bearing zero interest. The idea that arbitrage will effectively keep interest rates from falling below zero is deeply ingrained in the minds of economists. For example, Corriea, et. al. (2012) write:

Arbitrage between money and bonds requires nominal interest to be positive. This "zero bound" constraint gives rise to a macroeconomic situation known as a liquidity trap. It presents a difficult challenge for stabilization policy.
However, we know from recent experience that the ZLB appears not to be an economic constraint.  Several central banks today have set their deposit rates into negative territory:




There is currently over $10 trillion of government debt in the world yielding a negative nominal interest rate; see here. As of this writing, even long bonds like the German 10-year Bund are in negative territory.

Well, alright, so the ZLB is evidently not an economic constraint. But surely there is some limit to how low nominal interest rates can fall? This lower limit is called the effective lower bound (ELB). And economic theory is clear: if we're at the ELB in a recession, then monetary policy has done about as much as it can be expected to do.

But what exactly is the ELB? Is it -1%, -2%, -5%, or perhaps even lower? Economists like Miles Kimball believe it to sufficiently negative to warrant NIRP as an effective policy tool; see here (see also the discussion by Ken Rogoff in chapter 10 of his book). These arguments, however, did not seem to gain much traction. For example, in the present discussions concerning the Fed's new long-run monetary policy framework, the possibility of NIRP is not even mentioned. But perhaps it should be if the ELB is in fact significantly below zero. In what follows, I want to make my own (related) argument for why the ELB is probably a lot lower than most people think.

Suppose the Fed was to set the IOR to -10% (in a deep demand-driven recession, this would presumably be accompanied with a promise to raise the IOR at some point in the future). The traditional economic argument suggests that any security dominated in rate of return by cash would in this case be driven out of circulation.

The first thing we could imagine happening is banks attempting to convert their digital reserves into vault cash. Banks are presently holding over $1.6 trillion in reserves with the Fed. The largest denomination Federal Reserve note is $100. This is what $1 trillion in $100 bills apparently looks like:




That's about the size of a football field. Banks would not convert all of their reserves into cash--even if it was costless to do so--because they'd need about $20-30 billion or so to make interbank payments. Of course, managing all that cash would be far from costless. But there is a simpler reason for why banks would not make the conversion. The Fed could simply charge banks a 10% service fee on their vault cash.

Alright, well what effect is the -10% IOR rate going to have on the deposit rate (or fees) that banks offer (or charge) their depositors? Banks are not likely to pass the full cost on to their depositors, especially if they view the NIRP to be temporary, because they'll want to maintain their customer relationships.

But let us take the extreme case and suppose that NIRP is perceived to be permanent. Then surely deposit rates will decline (or bank fees will rise) significantly. Deposit rates may even decline to the point where depositors start withdrawing their money from the banking system. Banks may well let this source of funding go if they could borrow more cheaply from the Fed (banks would need to borrow reserves to honor the withdrawal requests of their customers). Of course, the Fed lending rate is also a policy variable and could, in principle, be lowered to negative territory as well.

But how realistic is it to imagine all or most bank deposits converted to cash? While this might be the case for small value accounts, it seems unlikely that the business sector would be able to manage its payments needs without the aid of the banking system. Even money market funds need to work through the banking system. I suppose one could imagine a new product created by (say) Vanguard in which they create a cash fund with equity shares redeemable for cash that is collected and stored in rented Las Vegas vault. But the moment the activity is intermediated, it becomes taxable. If the Fed is not permitted to tax (oops, charge a service fee) such entities, the fiscal authority could, in principle, implement a surcharge that is set automatically off the IOR rate in some manner.

I think in this way one can see how the ELB might easily be well below -5% (or more). This is probably low enough to allow us to disregard the ELB as a binding economic constraint. The relevant constraint is always a legal one. And laws can be changed if it is deemed to serve the public interest.

Keep in mind that in a large class of economic models, ranging from Keynes (1936) to New Keynesian, there is potentially much to be gained by eliminating the ZLB. If these models are wrong, then let's get rid of them. But if they're roughly correct, why don't we take their policy prescriptions seriously? Let's stop talking about the ZLB as if it's a force of nature. It is a policy choice. And if it's a bad policy choice, it should be changed.

The EU Regional Competitiveness Index provides a tool for comparing development across different European regions, but overlooks how such regional competitiveness is achieved, and the long-term implications. Pieter Vanhuysse and Maarten Wensink argue that we need more sustainable and holistic models of economic success. The latest edition of the influential EU Regional Competitiveness Index (RCI 2.0) is out. Across a long list of dimensions, it …

International students and the revenue they generate for Australia are undoubtedly big business. But that business is arguably based on a revenue-generating model that is over-reliant on a few of our close neighbours to fill a yawning and growing funding gap created by governments that appear to have little concern for the declining quality of education that their lack of adequate care has produced.

Almost all Latin American countries are still tempted to use extractivism as a development model. Is it possible to strike a balance between environmental conservation and economic growth?

While researchers often point to the relevance of their research, economic models and econometric methods are typically inaccessible to a wider audience. Gabriel Ahlfeldt explains how interactive dashboards represent a useful, yet underutilised, tool to enhance the accessibility of quantitative research and increase its impact, showing how a new, massive house-price index he has developed … Continued

It is hard to think of an idea more central to capitalism than economics, particularly economic efficiency. Similarly, public policy is now — and has been for a while — conducted in the language of budgets, models, and cost-benefit analyses. But how accountable is this idea to the public?

Elizabeth Popp Berman is a sociologist and historian of economic thought at the University of Michigan and the author of the new book "Thinking Like An Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy." In this episode, she joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss this history of economics as a pervasive influence in the halls of political power in Washington and the challenges of believing in economic models as "truth" in an increasingly complex world. Using case studies in health care, debt forgiveness, pandemic economic recovery, and beyond, the three of them debate whether there are spheres of public and political life where economics has overstepped its bounds and if it belongs there altogether.

In mid-2021, Lord Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, joined our podcast and was almost singular (compared to other experts) in predicting the inflation that we see today. Now, as we look back on 2022, he rejoins us with a somewhat more optimistic outlook on what may happen next.

King, Bethany, and Luigi go back to the basics to unpack what was foreseeable, and what was less so. How did "too much money, too few goods" cause today's inflation? What were the effects of energy shocks, the COVID-related labor market, and what might be the implications for asset prices, wages, and interest rates, among other things? They discuss the successes and pitfalls of economic models, the risks ahead in policy approaches, and the political pressures that might impact their implementation.

Yes, OK, slow time of year, PR attempts to get a company written up will work well right now: AI sparks revolution in how much supermarkets charge you for foodDigital labelling can pass on price fluctuations more quickly and cut wasteYes, super and that might even be the effect. But the driver is, we very strongly suspect, this: electronic shelf labels (ESLs), the first step towards dynamic pricing, had been introduced in a small number of existing shops,……..Retail expert Clare Bailey said the move to digital labelling is the first step towards a "dynamic pricing model" in supermarkets as they look to reduce labour, ….. costsWe've all seen this in a shop, an individual clacking out new price labels to stick on a shelf of something or other. That person costs the shop about £10 an hour this year, it'll soon be about £11 just in wages alone (then add NI, benefits etc) and so the hunt is on to reduce labour costs. One central data entry to change the price on a whole shelf of product, job's a good 'un.We can think of this as just tech reducing labour costs, or labour costs being forced up and thereby inducing the job killing use of technology. Either works.Far more fun, to us at least, is that this begins to destroy a core tenet of New Keynesian economics. The idea of menu costs is central - it explains price stickiness. Prices do not smoothly change, they move in shuddery jumps. For there's a cost to changing the price - the cost of reprinting the menu - so it's only worth doing that when the underlying has changed enough to justify that cost of actually making the price change. This is true too. It's also why the New Classical and Real Business Cycle theories seem not to explain the world quite right, but New Keynesian seem to do better. Which is why every central bank and Treasury economic model is, by and large, New Keynesian.That's all a recent development, certainly recent decades. Which is where the fun comes in really. For those real world economic models have all zeroed in on a specific explanatory structure just as that structure becomes non-explanatory. If changing prices is now the one single entry in a central database for a shop, possibly for an entire chain, then menus costs are much less of an issue. The world is moving closer to those RBC and New Classical models where prices change swiftly and near costlessly and so the economy as a whole reacts near instantly to change. Yes, obviously, these are all tendencies, not absolutes. But we really do think that it's terribly fun that just as the orthodoxy narrows in on something generally agreed that it is also becoming untrue.As in that old joke about economics exams. Universities still use the same questions they did a century ago - it's the answers that have changed. Which, actually, they have.