Author: Zachary Bartsch

Covid Evidence: Supply Vs Demand Shock

Zachary Bartsch4 Comments

By the time most students exit undergrad, they get acquainted with the Aggregate Supply – Aggregate Demand model. I think that this model is so important that my Principles of Macro class spends twice the amount of time on it as on any other topic. The model is nice because it uses the familiar tools of Supply & Demand and throws a macro twist on them. Below is a graph of the short-run AS-AD model.

Quick primer: The AD curve increases to the right and decreases to the left. The Federal Reserve and Federal government can both affect AD by increasing or decreasing total spending in the economy. Economists differ on the circumstances in which one authority is more relevant than another.

The AS curve reflects inflation expectations, short-run productivity (intercept), and nominal rigidity (slope). If inflation expectations rise, then the AS curve shifts up vertically. If there is transitory decline in productivity, then it shifts up vertically and left horizontally.

Nominal rigidity refers to the total spending elasticity of the quantity produced. In laymen’s terms, nominal rigidity describes how production changes when there is a short-run increase in total spending. The figure above displays 3 possible SR-AS’s. AS0 reflects that firms will simply produce more when there is greater spending and they will not raise their prices. AS2 reflects that producers mostly raise prices and increase output only somewhat. AS1 is an intermediate case. One of the things that determines nominal rigidity is how accurate the inflation expectations are. The more accurate the inflation expectations, the more vertical the SR-AS curve appears.*

The AS-AD model has many of the typical S&D features. The initial equilibrium is the intersection between the original AS and AD curves. There is a price and quantity implication when one of the curves move. An increase in AD results in some combination of higher prices and greater output – depending on nominal rigidities. An increase in the SR-AS curve results in some combination of lower prices and higher output – depending on the slope of aggregate demand.

Of course, the real world is complicated – sometimes multiple shocks occur and multiple curves move simultaneously. If that is the case, then we can simply say which curve ‘moved more’. We should also expect that the long-run productive capacity of the economy increased over the past two years, say due to technological improvements, such that the new equilibrium output is several percentage points to the right. We can’t observe the AD and AS curves directly, but we can observe their results.

The big questions are:

  1. What happened during and after the 2020 recession?
  2. Was there more than one shock?
  3. When did any shocks occur?

Below is a graph of real consumption and consumption prices as a percent of the business cycle peak in February prior to the recession (See this post that I did last week exploring the real side only). What can we tell from this figure?

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This Time was Way Different

Zachary Bartsch5 Comments

The financial crisis recession that started in late 2007 was very different from the 2020 pandemic recession. Even now, 15 years later, we don’t all agree on the causes of the 2007 recession. Maybe it was due to the housing crisis, maybe due to the policy of allowing NGDP to fall, or maybe due to financial contagion. I watched Vernon Smith give a lecture in 2012 in which he explained that it was a housing crisis. Scott Sumner believes that a housing sectoral decline would have occurred, and that the economy-wide deep recession and subsequent slow recovery was caused by poor monetary policy.

Everyone agrees, however, that the 2007 recession was fundamentally different from the 2020 recession. The latter, many believe, reflected a supply shock or a technology shock. Performing social activities, including work, in close proximity to others became much less safe. As a result, we traded off productivity for safety.

The policy responses to each of the two were also different. In 2020, monetary policy was far more targeted in its interventions and the fiscal stimulus was much bigger. I’ll save the policy response differences for another post. In this post, I want to display a few graphs that broadly reflect the speed and magnitude of the recoveries. Because the recessions had different causes, I use broad measures that are applicable to both.

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Russia, The US, and Crude Data

Zachary Bartsch4 Comments

Overall, I’ve been disappointed with the reporting on the US embargo against Russian oil. The AP reported that the US imports 8% of Russia’s crude oil exports. But then they and other outlets list a litany of other figures without any context for relative magnitudes. Let’s shine some more light on the crude oil data.*

First, the 8% figure is correct – or, at least it was correct as of December of 2021. The below figure charts the last 7 years of total Russian crude oil exports, US imports of Russian crude oil, and the proportion that US imports compose.  That 8% figure is by no means representative of recent history. The average US proportion in 2015-2018 was 7.8%. But the US share as since risen in level and volatility. Since 2019, the US imports compose an average of 11.9% of all Russian crude oil exports.

As an exogenous shock, the import ban on Russian crude oil might have a substantial impact on Russian exports. However, many of the world’s oil importers were already refusing Russian crude. The US ban may not have a large independent effect on Russian sales and may be a case of congress endorsing a policy that’s already in place voluntarily.

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Two Decades of Real Estate Data

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Total spending on real estate construction has been rising since 2011. By 2016 it had reached its previous 2006 peak. However, total spending on *residential* real estate construction didn’t reach its previous 2006 peak until November of 2020. The graph below also includes the proportion of residential construction spending (Green). It has been rising since 2009. In and of itself, nothing is good or bad about this figure. We might be spending less on non-residential construction because we are getting better at using less land per unit of good or service produced. Or, it could be that our real investment in future production is falling relative to our current residential consumption.  Regardless, the share of residential construction hasn’t been at this level since 2003.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=MzwL
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=MzwQ

Importantly, the difference in spending has not been driven by different construction costs. Both residential and non-residential construction costs have moved in tandem since 2010. Therefore, the rise in residential construction spending is not merely nominal – a greater proportion of resources are being consumed by residential construction. Indeed, real residential construction is up about 25% from 2019. The figure below illustrates real residential and nonresidential construction.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=MzwU

That figure requires a double-take.

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Inflation Empirics

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

Way back in the late 1970s and early 80s, Kydland and Prescott proposed rational expectations theory. This line of research arose, in part, because the Phillips curve ceased to describe reality well. Amid increasing inflation, people began to anticipate higher prices to a relatively correct degree when making labor, supply chain, and pricing decisions. Kydland and Prescott argued that individuals understand the rules of the game or how the world works – at least on average.

An increase in the money supply would increase total national spending, and increase demand for goods. However, firms also experienced increasing revenues and demanded more inputs such as commodities, capital, and intermediate goods. Because there were no greater productivity earlier in the supply chain, price roses. Firms began to understand that greater demand would eventually find its way to causing greater costs. Therefore, firms began raising prices before the cost of resources rose, increasing their willingness to pay for inputs and, ironically, hastening the increase in input prices. As a result, increases in the money supply began having substantial short-run price effects and negligible output effects.

However, assuming that people understand the rules of our economic system and ‘how the world works’ is hard to swallow. It is not at all clear that the typical economist understands monetary theory, much less clear that the typical person has a good understanding. Fortunately, another theory of expectations can help carry some of the load and achieve similar results.

Adaptive Expectations

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Asymmetric Liability, Common Law, & Urbanization

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Tort law is interesting. You can argue that someone harmed you, and you can cite almost no legislation in the process. Torte law in the US uses case law – the precedent set by previous rulings in the context of social norms. But, what cases did the early cases cite? They also cited earlier cases and social norms, though we may no longer have a record. The beauty of tort law it allows for changing relative costs in prudence and negligence.

Can you imagine a legislature attempting to codify the appropriate amount of neglect by, say, a painter? The standards would quickly go out of date. The relative cost of resources including labor, communications, materials, and the price differences among competitors of differing quality all change over time. Multiply these factors by 20 and then again by the number of occupations and regions in a country. You will quickly see that legislating the appropriate degree of prudence and neglect through congress is a fool’s errand. The challenge is too complicated and the world changes too quickly. In fact, attempting to legislate definitions for neglect and prudence could even backfire and result in regulatory arbitrage, which occurs when firms comply with de jur rules while avoiding them de facto.*

Externalizing Costs

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Mises’s Bureaucracy, a Recap

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

My favorite two economists are Ludwig Von Mises and Milton Friedman. They might consider one another from very different schools of thought, though there is reason to think that they are not so different. As an undergraduate student, I liked them both, but I became more empirics-minded in graduate school and as a young assistant professor.

As I progressed through graduate school and conducted empirical research, my opinions and policy prescriptions changed and were refined from what they once were. In graduate school, I didn’t study Austrian Economics, though it was certainly in the water at George Mason University. Recently, as an assistant professor with a few years under my belt, I picked up Bureaucracy (1944) and read it as a matter of leisure.

One word:

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Teaching Price Controls (Poorly)

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

Economics textbooks differ in their treatment of price controls. None of them does a great job, in my opinion. The reason is mostly due to the purpose of textbooks. Despite what you might suspect, most undergraduate textbooks are not used primarily to give students an understanding of the world. They are often used as a bound list of things to know and to create easy test questions. If a textbook has to change the assumptions of a model too much from what the balance of the chapter assumes, then the book fails to make clear what students are supposed to know for the test.

I think that this is the most charitable reason for books’ poor treatment of price controls – even graduate level books. The less charitable reasons include sloppy exposition due to author ignorance or an over-reliance on math. I honestly would have trouble believing these less charitable reasons.

I picked up 5 microeconomics text books and the below graph is typical of how they treat a price ceiling.

The books say that the price ceiling is perfectly enforced. They identify producer surplus (PS) as area C and consumer surplus (CS) as areas A & B. There are very good reasons to differ with these welfare conclusions.

Problem #1

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Fences, Schools, Dryer Lint, & Shower Levers

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In game theory, coordination games reflects the benefits of everyone settling on the same rules. Settling on the same rules can avoid a conflict and destructive competition. For example, some rules may be arbitrary, such as on which side of the road we’ll all drive. It doesn’t much matter whether a country’s vehicles drive along the right or left side of the street. As long as everyone is in the same lane, we overwhelmingly benefit from our coordination. The matrix below describes the game.

The above game reflects that whether we agree to drive on the left or on the right is trivial and that the important detail is that we agree on what the rule is. Rules like this are arbitrary. No amount of cost benefit analysis changes the answer. Other coordination rules are seemingly arbitrary, but do have different welfare implications. For example, according to English common law, a farmer was entitled to prohibit a herdsman’s flock from trampling his crops even if the farmland had no fence. Herdsmen were responsible for corralling their flocks or paying damages if they grazed on the farm. With lots of nearby farms, total welfare was higher with a rule of cultivation rights rather than grazing rights.

But the property rights could have been assigned to the herdsman instead. The law could have said that the sheep were free to graze with impunity and that the onus was on the farmer to build fences in order to keep the sheep at bay. In a world where there are a lot of farmers who are very nearby to one another, a small flock of sheep can do a lot of damage. And so, the cost-benefit analysis prescribes that herdsmen bear the cost of restricting the flock rather than the farmer. The matrix that describes this circumstance is below.

The above matrix reflects that agreeing on any rule is better than no rule at all. And, the rule that is selected has societal welfare implications. Choosing the ‘wrong’ rule means that we could get stuck in a rut of lower payoffs because coordinating a change in the rules is hard.

Schools

Another way in which the specific rule can be important is by whether it instantiates or works contrary to pre-existing incentives. Before compulsory schooling laws were passed, US states already had very high school attendance rates. Most parents sent their kids to school because it was a good investment. The ages at which children should be required to attend is largely, though not entirely, arbitrary. And wouldn’t you know it, most states applied their compulsory schooling legislation to the age groups for which the vast majority of children were already attending school. Enforcing a law against the natural incentives of human capital investment would have been more costly. The particular ages of compulsory schooling had different welfare implications due to the differing costs of enforcement.

Dryer Lint

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Housing & The Fed’s Reputation

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

I am not worried about inflation and I’m not worried about the total spending in the economy. As I’ve said previously, total spending is on track with the pre-pandemic trend and, I think, that helped us experience the briefest recession in US history. When output growth declines below trend, we face higher prices or lower incomes. The former causes inflation, the latter causes large-scale defaults. Looking at the historical record, I’m for more concerned about the latter.

I do, however, want to call special attention to the composition of the Fed’s balance sheets. Specifically, its Mortgage Backed Security (MBS) assets. Having learned from the 2008 recession, the Fed was very intent on maintaining a stable and liquid housing market. Purchasing MBS is one way that it maintained that stability. Its total MBS holdings almost doubled from March of 2020 to December of 2021 to $2.6 trillion. Should we be concerned?

At first, a doubling sounds scary. And, anything with the word ‘trillion’ is also scary. Even the graph below looks a little scary. MBS holdings by the Fed jumped and have continued to increase at about a constant rate. Is the housing market just being supported by government financing? What happens when the Fed decides to exit the market?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=L2wv

Luckily for us, there is precedent for Fed MBS tapering. The graph below is in log units and reflects that a similar acceleration in MBS purchases occurred in 2013. Fed net purchases were practically zero by 2015 and total MBS assets owned by the Fed were even falling by 2018. Do you remember the recession that we had in 2013 when the Fed stopped buying more MBS’s? Wasn’t 2018-2019 a rough time for the economy when the Fed started reducing its MBS holdings? No. We experienced a recession in neither 2013 nor 2018. Financial stress was low and RGDP growth was unexceptional.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=L2GG

Although there was no macroeconomic disruption, what about the residential sector performance during those times? Here is a worrisome proposed chain of causation:

  1. Relative to a heavier MBS balance sheet, the Fed reducing its holdings increases supply on the MBS market.
  2. This means that the return on creating new MBS’s falls (the price rises).
  3. A lower return on MBS’s means that there is less demand from the financial sector for new loans from loan originators.
  4. A tighter secondary market for mortgages decreases the eagerness with which banks lend to individuals.
  5. Fewer loans to individuals puts downward pressure on the demand for houses and on the price of the associated construction materials.

The data fits this story, but without major disruption.

Less eager lenders went hand-in-hand with higher mortgage rates and less residential construction spending. The substitution effect pushed more real-estate lending and spending to the commercial side. Whereas residential spending was almost the same in late 2019 as it was in early 2018, commercial real-estate spending rose 13% over the same time period.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=L2GH

But, importantly in the story, the income effect of a Fed disruption should have been negative, resulting in less total spending and lower construction material prices. And that’s not what happened. Total Construction spending rose and so did construction material prices. Both of these are the opposite of what we would expect if the Fed had caused disruption in the housing construction sector due to its MBS holding changes.   Spending on residential construction fell understandably. But spending on commercial construction and the price of construction materials rose.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=L2GI

My point is that you should not listen to the hysteria.

The Fed has a variety of assets on its balance sheet and it pays special attention to the residential construction sector. Do you think that there is a residential asset bubble? Ok. Now you have to address whether the high prices are due to demand or supply. Do you suspect that the Fed unloading its MBS’s will result a popped bubble and maybe even contagion? It’s ok – you’re allowed to think that. But the most recent example of the Fed doing that didn’t result in either a macroeconomic crisis or substantial disruption in the construction markets.

The Fed has a track record and it has a reputation that serves as valuable information concerning its current and prospective activities. The next time that someone gets hysterical about Fed involvement in the housing sector, ask them what happened last time? Odds are that they don’t know. Maybe that information doesn’t matter for their opinion. You should value their opinion accordingly.