Year: 2022

Raging Inflation, Spiking Rates, Plunging Stocks, Oh, My!

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

It has been such a volatile couple of days in the markets that you hardly know where to focus.  Friday’s inflation print was 8.6% (year/year), higher than expected and the highest in forty years, showing (yet again) that the Fed’s “transitory inflation” line was always just fantasy. Despite its glacial, foot-dragging pace of response to date, the Fed will need to raise short-rates (which they directly control) faster and farther than earlier planned. The Fed does not directly control long-term rates, but they influence them by buying and selling bonds on the open markets. For years, they have been buying bonds (driving interest rates lower), but they will have to stop that and maybe go the other way, being net sellers of bonds.  This will make financing government deficits much more difficult.

Anyway, both short and long term rates have gone vertical in the past few days as markets price in all this, reaching levels not seen since the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis:

Rates of U. S. 1-Year Bills. From Wolf Richter.

Rates of U. S. 10-Year Notes. From Wolf Richter.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4518160-treasury-bonds-plunge-yields-spike-stock-crypto-mess

Mortgage rates will likely march even further upward, increasing the monthly payments for most homeowners. At some point, this will deflate the housing market. Some of today’s eager new homebuyers who paid over asking price, assuming that housing only goes up, may be in for a rude awakening.

It seems like the only way to tamp down inflation is old-fashioned demand destruction. Stock market participants are starting to price in the dreaded R-word (recession). The plunging stock market has been in the news the last few days. Yes, it has dropped a lot, but shown on a five-year chart below it may not be so apocalyptic. It is dropping from ridiculously over-optimistic market highs at the end of 2021.  We are still slightly above the pre-COVID peak:

S&P 500 Index. From Seeking Alpha.

If you are young and working, you should see lower prices as a buying opportunity. If you are making regular contributions to a savings plan in stocks (dollar cost averaging), your dollars are buying you more stocks. If you feel you must DO something, you could always rebalance your portfolio, shifting some funds into stocks from something else, to maintain a say 70/30 stock/bond portfolio. Peace…

It’s nice going to the movies again

mdmakowskyLeave a comment

Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those truly great movies that manages to be high and low art at the same time. It is beautiful, absurd, timeless, and inspiring. It is without question my favorite expression of positive nihilism in popular art I’ve ever come across. There is no intrinsic meaning to life, but in that absence there is the opportunity to fill that empty vessel with meaning of your own design. As the characters ponder their own designs on how to impose meaning on the shifting and chaotic ocean of the multiverse, they present theories of strength, weakness, destiny, and fashion. I loved this film.

I also saw the new Top Gun film. I consumed a heroic amount of popcorn and diet pepsi. I learned absolutely nothing. I’m not sure I ever had a serious thought during it’s entire run time. I thoroughly enjoyed every second of it. I’m just so terribly happy to be going to the movies again.

Thoughts for the week on podcasts and the Constitution

Joy BuchananLeave a comment
  1. Jamal Greene was the most recent guest on Conversations with Tyler. This is how Greene describes his work habits as an academic with children:

GREENE: … my most effective work habit is to use the entire day to work. I get a lot of work done late at night. Most of my time during the day is spent teaching classes or meeting with students, and all writing and reading and preparation and everything is much later. That means I don’t watch television shows. It’s a really extended workday.

I work during soccer practices. I work sitting in the car while my kids are doing something or other. I don’t segregate times of the day where I can’t work.

One thing I find personally is that if I’m doing empirical work then I really need to be inside with at least one external monitor. As much as I like the idea of working from the pool (referencing the viral video of the week) being at my office is the best set up.

2. Currently I am teaching an online asynchronous class. Considering that my students are on the move in different places right now, I decided to create a podcast assignment. This seems to have gone over well. One student had a criticism for the episode that she chose: it was not entertaining. Another student complained that his episode had too much fluff about the personal lives of the speakers. This raises the interesting question of how the experts manage to make podcasts informative without being boring. It’s an art. Talking about your personal life to break up the subject matter can work but it can also feel like a waste of time.

3. For a discussion group, I read The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers.

Something that stood out to me was the sheer intensity of these guys. Liberty is a serious topic, but I’ll just share something that is funny from the book.

In the middle of a long fiery speech of Patrick Henry, the book inserts a line in brackets:

What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue? {Here Mr. Henry strongly and pathetically expatiated on the probability of the President’s enslaving Americans, and the horrible consequences that must result.}

A footnote explains that stenographer had difficulty keeping up with Mr. Henry and was occasionally reduced to recording a mere summary of his words. It’s impressive that a stenographer could have gotten as much as they did.

I came away from the book thinking that people should talk more about this moment in history, and then I started noticing when people do talk about it. In fact, Tyler was interviewing a constitutional scholar this week and explicitly addressed the idea of “federalism.”

4. The debate does rage on 200+ years later.

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Not so Great Expectations

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

People have expectations about the world. When those expectations are violated, they usually change their behavior in order to account for the new information (on the margin at least). Does unexpected inflation affect people’s behavior? Of course. William Phillips thought so (the famous version of the Phillips Curve assumes constant inflation expectations).

Macroeconomists often separate the world into reals and nominals. Sometimes we produce more and other times we produce less. Those are the reals. The prices that we pay and the money that we spend are the nominals. There is what’s sometimes called a ‘loose joint’ between reals and nominals. That is, they do not move in tandem, nor are they entirely independent. If the Fed suddenly slows the growth of the money supply, then economic activity growth might also slow – but not by the same amount. In the long run, reals and nominals are largely independent. Whether we have 2% vs 3% annual inflation over the course of some decade is probably not important for our real output at the end of that decade.

It Takes Two to Tango.

It is often said that the Fed can achieve any amount of total spending in the economy that it prefers. It can achieve any NGDP. But, the Fed doesn’t control NGDP as a matter of fiat. The Fed changes interest rates and the money supply in order to change the total spending in our economy. Importantly, the effect of Fed policy changes is contingent on how the public reacts. After all, the Fed can increase the money supply. But it is us who decides how much to spend.

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Cost Plus Drugs

James Bailey1 Comment

A new online pharmacy funded by Mark Cuban promises to sell prescription drugs at a fixed markup, 15% over cost plus a $3 flat fee. What’s the catch?

As far as I can tell, there are two- they only sell generics, and they don’t take insurance. But I think this will still save many people a lot of money.

The most expensive drugs get that way because they are sold by monopolies, almost always because they were invented less than 20 years ago and are still on-patent. But it’s still possible for older drugs to be sold at huge markups, as Martin Shkreli could tell you now that he’s out of prison (Shkreli’s case is supposedly what inspired Dr. Alex Oshmyansky to start this pharmacy). Sometimes you can still blame these markups on monopolies, just induced by the FDA instead of patents. But even for generic drugs with competitive manufacturing, you still sometimes see large and variable markups at the pharmacy level. So I think there’s still huge value in a pharmacy offering a low and stable markup on generics.

What about not taking insurance? First of all, lower cash prices obviously still benefit the 28 million Americans who don’t have health insurance. But even for those with insurance, it’s surprisingly common throughout health care to find cash prices lower than their copay. I have relatively good insurance but when I checked Cost Plus Drugs for the last two prescriptions my family got, I found that one was 80% cheaper than our copay (the other was about the same as our copay, so we’d only come out even, though we’d presumably save our insurer a lot).

Cost Plus Drugs originally wanted to also work through insurance as a Pharmacy Benefit Manager, but seems to have pivoted to being an “unPBM” that just offers generics to employers to supplement their existing plans. They also want to manufacture some of their own drugs, which seems on track to happen. They were started as a Public Benefit Corporation, so while they are for-profit this lends credibility to the idea that they really do want to keep prices down, not just start with low prices to make a name for themselves. Anyway, this seems like a worthy experiment and I encourage anyone with an expensive prescription to see if you can get it cheaper here.

Sick of high drug prices? Try some low-price anti-nausea mediation

Violence, Guns, and Policy in the United States

Jeremy Horpedahl12 Comments

The United States is a uniquely violent country among high-income democracies. And by the best available data on homicides, the US has always been more violent. Homicides are useful to look at because we generally have the best data on these (murders are the most likely crime to be reported) and it’s the most serious of all violent crimes.

Just how much more violent is the US than other high-income democracies? As measured by the homicide rate, about 6-7 times as violent. We can see this first by comparing the US to several European countries (and a few groupings of similar countries).

Let me make a few things clear about this chart. First, this is data for homicides, which are typically defined as interpersonal violence. Thus, it excludes deaths on the battlefield, genocides, acts of terrorism (generally speaking), and other deaths of this nature. That’s how it is defined. If we plotted a chart of battlefield deaths, it would look quite different, but there’s not much good reason to combine these different forms of violent death.

On the specifics of the chart, prior to 1990 these data are averages from multiple observations over multi-year timespans (generally 25 or 50 years). The data on European countries comes from a paper by Eisner on long-term crime trends (Table 1). The countries chosen are from this paper, as are the years chosen. Remember that historical data is always imperfect, but these are some of the best estimates available. For the US, I used Figure 5 from this paper by Tcherni-Buzzeo, and did my best to make the timeframes comparable to the Eisner data. The data are not perfect, but I think they are about as close as we can get to long-run comparisons. For the data from 1990 forward, I use the IHME Global Burden of Disease study, and the death rates from interpersonal violence (to match Eisner, I average across grouped countries).

When we average across all the European countries in the first chart and compare the US to Europe, we can see that the US has always been more violent, though the 20th century onwards does seem to show even more violence in the US relative to Europe. (These charts are slightly different from some that I posted on Twitter recently, especially the pre-1990 data as I tried to more carefully use the same periods for the averages — still only take this a rough guide).

And what is the main form by which this violence is carried out? In the US, it is undeniably clear: firearms. Between 1999 and 2020, there were almost 400,000 homicides in the US (using CDC data). Over 275,000 of these, or about 70%, were carried out with firearms. The next largest category is murder with a knife or other sharp object, with about 10% of murders. And homicides have become even more gun-focused in recent years: about 80% of murders in 2020-21 were committed with guns.

So, there’s the data. But the important social scientific question is: Can we do anything about it? Are there any public policies, either about guns or other things, that will reduce gun violence? Could restrictions on gun use actually increase homicides, since no doubt guns are also used defensively?

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Economic Underpinnings of the Renaissance in Northern Italy

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

The Renaissance in northern Italy was a period between roughly 1350 and 1550 (definitions vary) when a proto-modern outlook and culture and economy replaced  feudal medieval society. We all know about the great artistic and literary and scientific advances made at this time and place. I got curious about the economics behind all this. It is clear that the cities of northern Italy, such as Florence, were extremely prosperous, otherwise they could not have funded all these artists and architects.

It has jokingly been said, “Ah, I don’t see what is so great about Shakespeare – – all he did was string together a bunch of famous quotes.”  Well, since I know little about all this, what I will do here is mainly string together a bunch of relevant quotes.  Let the citations begin….

This blurb from “helenlo-weebly” (?) gives a good overview, noting the  importance of trade and the shift from rural barter to an urban money economy:

Trade brought many new ideas and goods to Europe.  A bustling economy created prosperous cities and new classes of people who had enough money to support art and learning.  Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa were located on the trade routes that linked the rest of western Europe with the East.  Both these city-states became bustling trading centers.  Trading ships brought goods to England, Scandinavia, and present-day Russia.  Towns  along trading routes provided inns and other services for traveling merchants.

          The increase of trade led to a new kind of economy.  During the middle ages people traded goods for other goods.  During the Renaissance people began using coins to buy goods which created a money economy.  Moneychangers were needed to covert one type of currency into another.  Therefore, many craftspeople, merchants, and bankers became more important i society.  Crafts people produced goods that merchants traded all over Europe.  Bankers exchanged currency, loaned money, and financed their own business. 

         Some merchants and bankers grew very rich.  They could afford to help make their cities more beautiful.  Many became patrons and provided new buildings and art; they helped found universities.  This led many city-states to become a flourishing educational and cultural center.

Bartleby.com notes  technical advances in ship construction, and the rise of Florentine bankers:
Genoa and Venice also made advancements in shipbuilding allowing ships to sail all year long and the increased the volume of goods that could be transported (accelerated speed)…Florentine merchants and bankers acquired control of papal banking (acting as tax collectors).

Brewminate  notes the rise of modern commercial infrastructure (which depends on law and order, with contracts being honored) and the virtuous cycle of trade and urban craftsmanship promoting each other. Also, the economic and social impact of the Black Death (which is a huge topic of itself):

The Crusades had built lasting trade links to the Levant, and the Fourth Crusade had done much to destroy the Byzantine Empire as a commercial rival to Venice and Genoa. Thus, while northern Italy was not richer in resources than many other parts of Europe, its level of development, stimulated by trade, allowed it to prosper. Florence became one of the wealthiest cities of the region…

In the thirteenth century, Europe in general was experiencing an economic boom. The city-states of Italy expanded greatly during this period and grew in power to become de factofully independent of the Holy Roman Empire. During this period, the modern commercial infrastructure developed, with joint stock companies, an international banking system, a systematized foreign exchange market, insurance, and government debt. Florence became the center of this financial industry and the gold florin became the main currency of international trade.

The decline of feudalism and the rise of cities influenced each other; for example, the demand for luxury goods led to an increase in trade, which led to greater numbers of tradesmen becoming wealthy, who, in turn, demanded more luxury goods…

The Black Death [in the fourteen century] wiped out a third of Europe’s population, and the new smaller population was much wealthier, better fed, and had more surplus money to spend on luxury goods like art and architecture.

What motivated the newly rich urban elites to so assiduously patronize the arts? According to dailyhistory.org, it was largely a desire to assert one’s status and to curry favor with the local citizens:

The New Elites such as the De Medici used spectacles and display to assert themselves in society and to demonstrate their wealth. Wealthy members of the urban elite and the aristocracy were always keen to demonstrate their status. This need to publicize and affirm one’s status led to the patronage of great artists and writers to provide displays and exhibit the wealth and power of the elite. This need for others’ recognition was vital in the Renaissance, which led to the lavish patronage of the period. This led to a great deal of competition to patronize the best artists and writers.

And there you have it.

The Political Economy of Crazy

mdmakowsky1 Comment

The Ohio State House of Representative has passed an absolutely insane law granting adults the option to challenge the gender of children participating in youth sports. This thread has the details, read at your own emotional peril:

Now, let’s keep a few things in mind. First, it hasn’t passed the Senate yet, which won’t make a decision until November. Second, there is no guarantee the governor would sign it into law if it passes the Senate. Third, the likelihood that such a law would hold up in court seems slim, though I’m certainly not a legal expert. Fourth, it strikes me as extremely unlikely the Republican party has any interest in having the legally prescribed violation of children as something they have to defend in subsequent elections.

So then what the hell just happened? Why have state houses of representatives become places where the lunatic fringe not only can get an institutional toehold, but actually push legislation through?

Let me answer my own question with a different question.

Can you name your state house representative? Name you name any representative from your state house? Can you name anyone who has been a representative in your state house that didn’t subsequently gain fame in national politics?

I can’t either.

The simple fact seems to be that voters don’t pay much attention to state representatives. Voter turnout is dependent on the draw of elections for national offices, and subsequent voter decisions largely leverage party brand. But that doesn’t mean candidates don’t have options. There are, of course, brands within parties (progressive Democrats, Trumpist Republicans, etc), which are particularly important in primaries. There are campaign platform choices that may resonate with informed voters, as well. The notion that informed voters can swing an election depends depends on the Miracle of Aggregation and the Law of Large Numbers. Simply put, if the voter errors are random, then completely ignorant voters should cancel out, leaving the outcome to be determined by the minority of informed voters.

What happens with a vanishingly thing number of people are informed, though? Candidates could inform them, but this is a state house election. Candidates don’t have any campaign money to inform them with. What they need is free campaign advertising. What they need is attention.

You know what gets attention? Crazy. Crazy gets attention.

Proposing and passing legislation to allow strangers to demand that children be physically inspected to determine their gender, that will get attention. That the “legitimacy” of a childs physical appearance be publicly brought into doubt, in front of peers and a crowd of peers. The shock, the tears, they chumming of the waters for the angriest parents and the most unhinged theories, that gets people to write articles and tweets. Articles and tweets that might include a candidate’s name. And if people know a candidate’s name, they might check their box come election time.

Social media gives the impression that everyone is paying attention to everything, but I suspect it is exactly the oppositve. We’ve never bored anymore, which means that the price of grabbing our attenion is higher than ever. For shoestring campaigns, the only way to get over the top is to offer somethings so irresistible that voters will be compelled to grant them a moment’s thought. Which isn’t to say that all of this insanity is pure pantomime. Sure, there are incentives to acting crazy. But causality can go the other way as well. The less we pay attenion to state politics, the more that elections will select for crazy.

This is all a long way of saying that I don’t see any reason it won’t keep getting even dumber.

No in-group bias from financial choices in latest experiment

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

“How Dictators Use Information about Recipients” is my new project with Laura Razzolini. A working paper is up at SSRN. We use the Dictator Game to measure if people are generous toward others who made a similar choice.

In the first stage of the experiment, every player gets to make their own choice about whether or not to invest in a risky option (called Option B). Players can pick Option A if they do not want to invest.

In the second stage, participants get to decide if they will send any money to another anonymous player. If a “dictator” (the person who determines the final allocation of money) decided to take the risk on Option B in stage 1, would they be more generous toward a counterpart if they know that person also picked Option B?

We explain in our paper why the literature indicates such a form of favoritism could be expected.

Social identity theory is the psychological basis for intergroup discrimination. Economic experiments have created feelings of group identity in various ways, leading to significant effects on behavior. Chen & Li (2009) demonstrate that group identity formation can affect social preferences.

Chen and Li (2009) started by having subjects review paintings by two different modern artists. The subjects were divided into two groups, based on their reported painting preferences. Subjects were informed about their group membership by the experimenter.

The Chen and Li paper has been cited almost 2000 times. Group identity is a topic of interest. Several experimental papers demonstrate that strangers can have team feelings induced quickly with the right procedures. Those team loyalties affect behavior in incentivized tasks.

Group feelings artificially induced in the lab by Eckel & Grossman (2005) influence levels of cooperation and contributions to public goods. Pan & Houser (2013)  induce group identities by asking subjects to complete tasks in groups.  Pan & Houser (2019) found that investors trust in-group members more. The in-group has been induced in several different ways in lab experiments. In this paper, we investigate whether in-group effects arise from making a common financial decision in the first stage of the experiment.

Do you think our manipulation in the beginning affected giving?

Nope. There was no effect. Dictators who chose Option B did not give more to recipients who also chose Option B.

Not every result in the paper is a null result. One piece of information caused a large increase in giving. If we inform the dictator that their counterpart started with less money in the first stage (due to bad luck) then the dictator would give more. Sympathy was inspired, as we predicted, by knowing if a recipient was “poor” in the experiment. Conversely, if dictators are informed that their counterpart is “rich” then they excused themselves from having to give up money to help.

Information about financial choices, at least in our sterile simple environment, neither polarized nor united the participants. The giving with only choice information was higher than giving to “rich” but lower than giving to “poor”. Lastly, we provided all of the information at once. With full information, dictators were still heavily influenced by the starting endowments and choices information had no effect.

Understanding polarization is important. Humans exhibit tribal instincts to not help those who are perceived as different. In our experiment we seem to have found one difference that that people are willing to tolerate or overlook.

See also my Works in Progress blog about polarization and a different experiment.  

References

Chen, Yan, and Sherry Xin Li. “Group Identity and Social Preferences.” American Economic Review 99, no. 1 (March 2009): 431–57.

Eckel, Catherine C., and Philip J. Grossman. “Managing Diversity by Creating Team Identity.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 58, no. 3 (2005): 371–92.

Pan, Xiaofei, and Daniel Houser. “Why Trust Out-Groups? The Role of Punishment under Uncertainty.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 158 (2019): 236–54.

Pan, Xiaofei Sophia, and Daniel Houser. “Cooperation during Cultural Group Formation Promotes Trust towards Members of Out-Groups.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280, no. 1762 (July 7, 2013): 20130606.

Post Pandemic Vacation Arbitrage

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

My wife traveled to Ireland with a friend after she graduated with her bachelor’s degree. She had lived in Europe as a child and had travelled for mission trips. But travelling to the Irish Republic as a young adult, for the singular purpose of celebration and leisure, made a big impact on my eventual wife and she recounted it for years.

Remember pre-Covid when life was so easy? Many of us had planned trips, for business and leisure, that were interrupted. By now, the vast majority of people are back to ‘normal’ (I think?). Classes are in-person, masks are largely optional, and there is no more line stretching out down the sidewalk near the Trader Joe’s. With all this normalcy, one might ask:

Where’s your next vacation?

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