Tag Archives: Investment

“Austerity,” EJ, 2021

Economic Journal, February 2021, with Harris Dellas. PDF.

We study the optimal debt and investment decisions of a sovereign with private information. The separating equilibrium is characterised by a cap on the current account. A sovereign repays debt amount due that exceeds default costs in order to signal creditworthiness and smooth consumption. Accepting funding conditional on investment/reforms relaxes borrowing constraints, even when investment does not create collateral, but it depresses current consumption. The model contains the signalling elements emphasised by creditors in the Greek austerity programmes and is consistent with the reduction in the loans issued by Greece and their interest rate following the 2015 election.

Economic Aspects of the Energy Transition

In an NBER working paper, Geoffrey Heal discusses some aspects of the energy transition to come.

On infrastructure investments:

the likely net investment required to go carbon-free is now as little as $0.179 trillion

renewable power from wind and solar PV plants is now less expensive than power from gas, coal or nuclear plants … If it were not for the intermittency of renewables, we would save money by converting to clean power.

the social benefits from stopping the CO2 emissions from coal and gas in power generation in the U.S. amount to $200bn annually, roughly an order of magnitude greater than the costs. Furthermore, these benefits will continue for ever, whereas the costs are fully paid by 2050. … As greenhouse gases are a global public bad, many of these benefits will accrue to countries other than the U.S.

Carbon taxes only delay the extraction of fossil fuels except for those fuels whose marginal extraction cost is sufficiently high such that extraction cost plus tax exceeds the cost of alternative energy sources:

the Pigouvian and Hotelling frameworks lead to rather different conclusions when it comes to thinking about the effectiveness of a carbon tax. Pigou emphasizes the impact of a tax on substitution between commodities, in this case between energy sources. Hotelling on the other hand emphasizes the impact of a tax on an exhaustible resource on the time-path of consumption of that resource.

[in the Hotelling setting] the tax either has no effect at all on the cumulative consumption of the fossil fuel, or it drives it out of the market completely.

If we want to reduce cumulative oil consumption by for example 30%, then we need a tax of about $500 per ton of CO2: if we wanted to reduce oil consumption by two thirds we would need a tax of over $600 per ton CO2.

Electricity pricing:

The marginal social cost of power from renewable sources is close to zero, as wind, solar and hydro all have essentially zero operating costs. So we would need much lower power prices to provide the correct incentives to use clean power rather than fossil fuels.

The classic response to this conundrum has been to recommend two-part tariffs, with a fixed charge or connection or membership charge recovering the fixed costs and a usage tariff covering the variable costs.

“Austerity,” EJ, forthcoming

Economic Journal, forthcoming, with Harris Dellas. PDF.

We study the optimal debt and investment decisions of a sovereign with private information. The separating equilibrium is characterized by a cap on the current account. A sovereign repays debt amount due that exceeds default costs in order to signal creditworthiness and smooth consumption. Accepting funding conditional on investment/reforms relaxes borrowing constraints, even when investment does not create collateral, but it depresses current consumption. The model contains the signalling elements emphasized by creditors in the Greek austerity programs and is consistent with the reduction in the loans issued by Greece and their interest rate following the 2015 election.

Sources of Low Real Interest Rates

In a (December 2015) Bank of England Staff Working Paper, Lukasz Rachel and Thomas Smith dissect the global decline in long-term real interest rates over the last thirty years.

A summary of their executive summary:

  • Market measures of long-term risk-free real interest rates have declined by around 450bps.
  • Absent signs of overheating this suggests that the global neutral rate fell.
  • Expected trend growth as well as other factors affecting desired savings and investment determine the neutral rate.
  • Global growth was fairly steady before the crisis but may (be expected to) fall after the financial crisis. Recently, slower labor supply (demographics) and productivity growth may account for a 100bps decline in the real rate.
  • Desired savings rose, due to demographics (90bps), higher within country inequality (45bps), and higher savings rates in emerging markets following the Asian crisis (25bps).
  • Desired investment fell, due to a lower relative price of capital goods (50bps) and less public investment (20bps).
  • The spread between the return on capital and the risk-free rate rose (70bps).
  • These trends look likely to persist and the “global neutral real rate may settle at or slightly below 1% over the medium- to long-run”.

From page 2 of the paper:
Untitled

See also the summary by James Hamilton; the White House CEA report; and the 17th Geneva report.

Secular Stagnation Skepticism

I was asked to play devil’s advocate in a debate about “secular stagnation.” Here we go:

Alvin Hansen, the “American Keynes” predicted the end of US growth in the late 1930s—just before the economy started to boom because of America’s entry into WWII. Soon, nobody talked about “secular stagnation” any more.

75 years later, Larry Summers has revived the argument. Many academics have reacted skeptically; at the 2015 ASSA meetings, Greg Mankiw predicted that nobody would talk about secular stagnation any more a year later. But he was wrong; at least in policy circles, people still discuss and worry about secular stagnation. As we do tonight.

In his 2014 article, Summers does not offer a definition of “secular stagnation,” in fact the article barely mentions the term. But Summers tries to offer a unifying perspective on pressing policy questions. The precise elements of this perspective change from one piece in the secular stagnation debate to the other.

Summers (2014) emphasizes a conflict between growth and financial stability: He argues that before the crisis, growth was built on shaky foundations that resulted in financial instability; and after the crisis, projections of potential output were revised downwards.

Summers frames this conflict in terms of shifts in the supply of savings on the one hand and investment demand on the other, which are reflected in lower real interest rates.

He identifies multiple factors underlying these shifts:

  • The legacy of excessive leverage
  • Lower population growth
  • Redistribution to households with a higher propensity to save
  • Cheaper capital goods
  • Lower after tax returns due to low inflation
  • Global demand for CB reserves
  • Later added: Lower productivity growth
  • Risk aversion which creates a wedge between lending and borrowing rates

All this, Summers argues, is aggravated by the fact that nominal interest rates are constrained by the ZLB, and that low rate policies induce risk seeking and Ponzi games—that is, new financial instability—by investors.

I am not convinced by the diagnosis. First, I feel uncomfortable with “secular” theories of “lack of aggregate demand.” I guess I believe in some variant of Says’ law; I agree that the massive surge of CB reserves is relevant in this context but even this cannot rationalize “secular” demand failure (presumably, the surge will stop and may even be reversed or prices will adjust).

Second, I disagree on population growth. We have two workhorse models in dynamic macroeconomics, the Ramsey growth model and the overlapping generations model. In the former, population growth does not affect the long-term real interest rate (R = gamma^sigma / beta). In the latter, population growth can have an effect by changing factor prices; but in this model the real interest rate is unrelated to the economy’s growth rate.

Third, productivity growth clearly is relevant. Gordon would support the view that the outlook is bleak on that front, others would disagree and predict the opposite. We will know only in a few decades.

Fourth, domestic factors cannot be the dominant explanation. With open financial markets, global factors shape savings and interest rates.

Fifth, real interest rates have trended downward for thirty years, including in decades when no one worried about “demand shortfalls.” (Nominal rates trended downward too, but that is easy to explain.) But it is true that historically, low real rates tend to coincide with low labor productivity growth. Over the last years, low real rates have gone hand in hand with a stock market boom; this suggests financial frictions or increased risk aversion.

There are competing narratives of what is going on. For example, Kenneth Rogoff argues that we are experiencing the usual deleveraging process of a debt supercycle; in Rogoff’s view, the secular stagnation hypothesis does not attribute sufficient importance to the financial crisis. Bob Hall has identified an interesting structural break: Since 2000, households and in particular, the teenagers and young adults in those households supply less labor (they play video games instead).

Summers discusses three policy strategies in his 2014 article:

  • Wait and see (he associates this with Japan)
  • Policies that lower nominal interest rates to stimulate demand; Summers mentions various risks associated with this strategy, related to bubbles, redistribution, or zombie banks
  • Fiscal and other stimulus policies: Fiscal austerity only if it strongly fosters confidence; regulatory and tax reform; export promotion, trade agreements, and beggar thy neighbor policies; and public investment

I am not convinced by the medicine either. In general, I miss a clear argument for why policy needs to respond. We might be very disappointed about slower future growth. But this does not imply that governments should intervene. The relevant questions are whether we identify market failures; whether governments can improve the outcome (or whether they introduce additional failures); and whether it’s worth it. And this must be asked against the background that some of the trends described before may reverse sooner than later. For example, aggregate savings propensities are likely to fall when baby boomers start to dis-save, and Chinese savings have started to ebb.

More specifically, the Japanese approach over the last decades strikes me as following the third, stimulus strategy favored by Summers rather than the first, wait and see strategy that he dislikes. So we should discount this argument. (In any case, Japan might be a bad example since its per capita growth is not that low.) I agree that I don’t see much scope on the monetary policy side. Monetary policy also has the problem that interest rate changes have income in addition to substitution effects, and that it has lost effectiveness, both fundamentally and in terms of public perceptions. I believe that our views on monetary policy transmission will dramatically change in the next ten years (think for example about the discussion on Neo-Fisherianism). The interesting thing about Summers’ third, stimulus strategy is that it is much less demand focused than conventional wisdom would have it (think of regulation and taxes and confidence to some extent as well).

Finally, the argument for public investment as the instrument of choice is much weaker than Summers suggests. One can think of a situation where private investment is held back for various reasons and as a consequence, interest rates are low and public investment is “cheap.” Nevertheless, the optimal policy response need not be to invest; it could be preferable to eliminate the friction on private investment. For example, with excessively tight borrowing constraints, tax cuts for private investors could be appropriate. If we believe that demographics is the problem then investment could be counter productive as well (dynamic inefficiency in the OLG context). And public investment as an instrument for stimulus is problematic for politico-economic reasons. Low interest rates do not imply that debt is “for free.” It indicates that the supply of risk-free savings is ample, for example because markets are very concerned about tail risks.

References

Lawrence H. Summers (2014), “U.S. Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound,” Business Economics 49(2), 65—73.

 

Investment Lessons

In the FT, looking back at ten years of The Long View, John Authers offers investment lessons that may be summarized in five points:

  • Always worry about costs and don’t try to outsmart the market. That is, hold index funds.
  • Rebalancing pays off.
  • Since getting the timing right is very hard, being out of the market is as risky as being in it.
  • To beat the market, buying at low prices is key. But know what you know and what you don’t. Public markets are efficient.
  • Money isn’t everything; in fact it’s not among the things that really matter.

Banks Are Not Intermediaries of Loanable Funds

In a recent Vox blog post, Zoltan Jakab and Michael Kumhof argue that macroeconomic models where banks intermediate loanable funds get it seriously wrong.

In the intermediation of loanable funds model, bank loans represent the intermediation of real savings, or loanable funds, between non-bank savers and non-bank borrowers … [but in reality] [t]he key function of banks is the provision of financing, meaning the creation of new monetary purchasing power through loans, for a single agent that is both borrower and depositor.

This difference has important implications. Compared to intermediation of loanable funds models, money creation models predict larger and faster changes in bank lending and real activity; pro- or acyclical rather than countercyclical bank leverage; and quantity rationing of credit after contractionary shocks. New loans in loanable funds model are accompanied by additional savings and thus, higher production or lower consumption. In money creation models, in contrast, they simply reflect an expansion of banks’ balance sheets that is only checked by profitability and solvency consideration. Moreover, “the availability of central bank reserves does not constitute a limit to lending and deposit creation. This … has been repeatedly stated in publications of the world’s leading central banks.”

A large part of [money creation banks’] response [to a contractionary shock], consistent with the data for many economies, is … in the form of quantity rationing rather than changes in spreads. … In the intermediation of loanable funds model leverage increases on impact because immediate net worth losses dominate the gradual decrease in loans. In the money creation model leverage remains constant (and for smaller shocks it drops significantly), because the rapid decrease in lending matches (and for smaller shocks more than matches) the change in net worth. … As for the effects on the real economy, the contraction in GDP in the money creation model is more than twice as large as in the intermediation of loanable funds model, as investment drops more strongly than in the intermediation of loanable funds model, and consumption decreases, while it increases in the intermediation of loanable funds model.

“Austerity,” CEPR, 2014

CEPR Discussion Paper 10315, December 2014, with Harris Dellas. PDF. Also published as CESifo Working Paper 5146, Study Center Gerzensee Working Paper 14-07. PDF, PDF.

We shed light on the function, properties and optimal size of austerity using the standard sovereign debt model augmented to include incomplete information about credit risk. Austerity is defined as the shortfall of consumption from the level desired by a country and supported by its repayment capacity. We find that austerity serves as a tool for securing a more favorable loan package; that it is associated with over‐investment even when investment does not create collateral; and that low risk borrowers may favour more to less severe austerity. These findings imply that the amount of fresh funds obtained by a sovereign is not a reliable measure of austerity suffered; and that austerity may actually be associated with higher growth. Our analysis accommodates costly signalling for gaining credibility and also assigns a novel role to spending multipliers in the determination of optimal austerity.